Members Club
Written and Directed by Marc Coleman
Starring Dean Kilbey, Perry Benson, Liam Noble, and Mark Monero
Unrated
Runtime 1 hour and 30 minutes
Available digitally in the UK October 21

by Samantha McLaren, Staff Writer

There’s something a little bit special about films willing to lean all the way into a fundamentally silly premise. British horror-comedy Members Club is one such film, gyrating its way through 90 minutes of genitals-based plot with a goofy grin on its face.

Written and directed by Marc Coleman, Members Club follows the exploits of “Wet Dreams,” a male stripper troupe whose poster proudly proclaims that they are the “5th best” in Essex. Led by absent father Alan (Dean Kilbey), the aging dancers are just about ready to hang up their booty shorts when they get the offer of a lifetime: £800 each, cash, plus drinks and snacks—and all for a single dance. 

There’s clearly a catch, but Coleman does a good job of establishing the quiet desperation of the situation. As a man in his fifties with a grown daughter, Alan appears to be renting a single room in a flat full of young people and sleeping on an air mattress. The group’s manager, Deano (Liam Noble), operates a cabbie service when he’s not inadvertently booking Wet Dreams for kids’ birthday parties. These are working-class blokes through and through, a surprisingly rare sight in British horror to this day. The fact that Members Club not only avoids demonizing these men but manages to make us root for them despite all the dick jokes is worth celebrating. 

The dick jokes are copious, which may put some viewers off, but the crass humor is hardly out of place here. Many of the best laughs, however, are distinctly British in a way that may leave international audiences nonplussed. It’s hard to imagine that the talking tinfoil hedgehog (a staple of the British buffet), Peter Andre cameo, or mask made out of Twiglets will translate seamlessly beyond old Blighty. But if you know, you know, and that's half the charm. 

While Members Club certainly favors comedy over horror, its gags soon turn to gore once the men discover that they’ve been booked by a coven who intend to lop their penises off. Leader Christine (Emma Stannard) wants to resurrect a 16th-century witch who was put to death in the area, using the clueless Joanne (Juliet Cowan, in a scene-stealing performance) as a vessel. This results in the witch spending much of her screen time wearing the kind of dress your middle-aged aunt would don for a night out, helping bring a little levity to the otherwise uninspired hag make-up design. With some decent gore effects on display elsewhere in the film, it would have been interesting to see a more out-of-the-box approach to the big bad. 

It’s also around the arrival of the witch that Coleman’s script starts to wander off course, finding a convoluted reason to get Alan’s daughter, Daisy (Barbara Smith), into the venue for an underbaked reconciliation. There are hidden depths to Alan that never entirely surface, and the fact that his character remains under-explored is made especially frustrating by the commitment that Kilbey brings to the role.

But stick with it, because Members Club’s slightly meandering middle gives way to a solid climax that sees the surviving performers putting their stripping skills to use for survival. It’s exactly the kind of over-the-top silliness you want to see in a film like this, even if it is bookended with a somewhat baffling final kill scene. 

Members Club won't be for everyone and its appeal to audiences outside the UK remains to be seen. But with raunchy humor that hits more often than it misses and severed penises in spades, it certainly makes for a unique midnight movie to put on with friends.