The late night slots at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest are always highly coveted. These are the films that after a long day of horror watching, the attending audience crave – something a little more upbeat, and a film that plays well in a crowd. The festival champions horror across the entire genre spectrum and the best way to end the halfway point of the festival is with a film that encourages a giggle or two. This year that prime late, late night main screen slot goes to writer and director Marc Coleman and his film, Members Club.
A homegrown humourful horror, Members Club joins a middle-aged all male stripping troupe who are lured to a hen’s night with a difference. Rather than dance for entertainment, the group find themselves fighting for their lives when the party goers decide to use them as part of a ritual to bring back a sixteenth century witch. Of all the spots across the FrightFest programme, Members Club is positioned perfectly. This is a film that will play best to a slightly inebriated, raucous crowd. It follows in the tradition of past FrightFest titles such as Eat Locals, Cockneys Versus Zombies, and Ibiza Undead at providing the audience with a British comedy horror that never takes itself too seriously.
Featuring plenty of British kitsch, including a sighting of the long thought extinct pineapple and cheese hedgehog, a UK crowd is the right place to kick this movie off. Quite how much mileage Members Club will get overseas is uncertain as the jokes seem custom made for the residents of the British Isles. The dance troupe, ‘Wet Dreams’, consists of four very different personalities with Dean Kilbey’s Alan the de-facto leader and the man clinging closest to his desire to make a living out of dancing. Through him, Members Club explores the plight of an ageing man whose work has dried up in a society that has moved on from The Full Monty. Kilbey does great work at making Alan a hapless hero, but when surrounded by more one-note stereotypes, there’s little meat for him to sink his teeth into.
As the Wet Dreams’ job from Hell gets worse, the comedy moments are pushed further, and given both the film’s title and the trade of the characters, viewers should prepare for more than a few innuendo laden gags. Placing men in peril at the hands of a powerful woman is a nice change-up from routine, and the woman in charge has a brilliant pantomime witch vibe to her. The kills – and there are a few – are brilliantly batty, a highlight being the utilisation of 90s pop idol, Peter Andre, with hilarious effect. The inclusion of Another Level’s long forgotten hit, ‘Freak Me’, is another unexpected treat. Outside of these instances, most of Members Club blurs into the rest. It retains a sense of humour and fun whilst watching, but is disappointingly easy to escape one’s memory.
As entertaining as Members Club is with the right crowd in the perfect environment, once outside of such a setting, Members Club struggles. Some of the jokes veer a little too close to being crass, and the overtly British set-pieces and commentary firmly places Members Club in a box that it might struggle to break out of. Fun within a FrightFest crowd of like-minded viewers, Members Club ultimately doesn’t have a great deal of lasting impact.
Members Club
Summary
One for the late night crowd, Members Club follows in the tradition of former FrightFest films Eat Locals, Cockneys Versus Zombies and Ibiza Undead, bringing a brief dose of humour to the horror festival.
Members Club was reviewed at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest 2024.
