Pigeon Shrine FrightFest Film Review – Members Club (2024)
Dick ripping balls to the wall horror-comedy packed with filthy laughs and gruesome gore.
Veteran male stripping troupe Wet Dreams are flabby and past it. With expanding waistlines and dwindling bookings, they long for the 90s heyday of hen dos and drunken adulation. As a final hurrah, they accept a lucrative job to give their ageing junk a final airing at an isolated club without reading the small print.
Soon enough, they find their freshly shaven backs against the wall as they fight to save their seasoned penises from the wizened clutches of a partially resurrected crone and her one-eyed ex-amateur dart-playing henchman.
Marc Coleman‘s outrageous black comedy is about as subtle as a pack of horny Jack Russells raiding a poodle parlour. The pre-credit sequence sees Jay’s dad from The Inbetweeners have a block of wood shoved up his backside while enjoying a dogging wank. The film’s cultural needle hovers around this point for the next 90 minutes as it strives to make Sex Lives of the Potato Men look like the work of Terrence Malick in his philosophical prime.
I desperately wanted to hate this film. However, it is executed with such gleeful disregard for sensibility and dick-swinging enthusiasm for the profane and puerile that it soon battered me into willing submission. Its relentless barrage of cock jokes and inventive smuttiness began to feel rebellious and, dare I say it, nostalgically British.
The cinematic equivalent of witty toilet graffiti that makes you smile despite yourself, Members Club is often as funny as it is foulmouthed. There is a clever balance between verbal and visual gags, the latter consistently literal, that belies its scorched earth approach to nuance.
It is good that the cast and crew are having a blast making a film, but that vibe has to trickle down to the audience, or it will not translate. In this case, the script is vibrant and vile enough to serve as a willing conduit for the infectious fun. Complaining that the female parts, no, not those, are underwritten would be like critiquing queefs in the Smithsonian museum. So I won’t.
The bloody effects are primarily practical and of solid quality, considering the camera seldom pulls away from the genitalia-based carnage, and there is a body count high enough to appease gore hounds. The penis-hunting hag is appropriately horrifying and evokes Roald Dahl’s The Witches, all be it after an all-night bukkake party.
There are strong arguments for Members Club being a body-positive film. Nestled in the creases of its rolling guts are the comfort crumbs of masculine assurance. The actors dance with a casual defiance that transcends cynical posturing and crass virtue-signalling. A movie featuring Peter Andre and a talking pineapple and cheese hedgehog may be the last place you’d expect to find an inspiring stance against body-shaming, but there it is nonetheless.
That being said, nothing will prepare you for the dangly delights of ‘Double dip Deano’!
★★★★
Members Club had its world premiere at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest 2024.
Pigeon Shrine FrightFest / Dean Kilbey, Perry Benson, Steve Oram, Peter Andre / Dir: Marc Coleman / Black Water Pictures / 18
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