A new movie has recently been added to Netflix’s Halloween originals called Killer Book Club. The movie Killer Book Club came out in August of this year, and was directed by Carlos Alonso-Ojea. Alonso has also directed Bloody April Fool, a movie released in 2013. The cast of Killer Book Club is Veki Vellila, Álvaro Mel, Priscilla Delgado, and Ane Rot. The genre of this movie is mystery, thriller, and horror, having an age rating of R.
Killer Book Club starts off the movie based around a bookish-girl. She gets nervous about her work and when it gets to her teacher she gets nervous. She had always been a writer and the story delves into it slightly at the beginning. She had recently been invited to a book club her and her friends are a part of and the first book was a thriller. Her friends encourage her to further her love of writing and her teacher meets with her about it. When her friends find out later that her teacher was not the best they plan to prank him and despite their knowledge it goes downhill from there.
The movie has a Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes of 8% and an audience rating of 26%. The movie was not well- rated among critics or regular audience viewers. One critic by the name of Murjani Rawls said, “‘Killer Book Club’ elects to be more of a carbon copy of things flipped before in every way possible for years.” This critic seems to view the movie as having been done before. John Serba, another critic, states, “These characters are too generic to even be familiar types, and don’t even give the actors any cliches to lean into. They’re just tools of the plot.” An audience viewer, Amanda Guarragi, described the movie as, “Killer Book club is a fun slasher and a good time.” The movie didn’t have an exemplary amount of reviews but it was reviewed very harshly by those who did.
Killer Book Club was a quite immersive movie. I watched the movie and couldn’t guess the ending which made the movie quite enjoyable and set it apart from other movies. The movie didn’t reveal too much background information and used that to its advantage to keep the Killer secret. With the killer being a secret throughout the entire movie, the movie didn’t have plot holes when killing off characters and even wrapped up the movie meticulously. The movie had good graphics and CGI. The gore wasn’t fake and almost looked lifelike while the movie didn’t look like it used a lot of editing to make the gore look that way. Throughout the movie there are references to the horror genre as a whole and the movie makes references to it picking at its details and clichés. Killer Book Club felt paced and organized, with a good balance of common and uncommon elements. With the camera panning over dead bodies it didn’t stay too long and didn’t hide them at all which contributed to the composition of the plot. I would recommend this movie as it was less ‘contrived’, as the script commonly retorted, and would rate it a ten out of ten. Unlike the other classic horrors, this one felt less predictable and holds viewers attention more than those that are commonly known.
