March 01, 2004

OH DREAD: Wanting to clear

OH DREAD: Wanting to clear my head of POTC, I went Sunday to see Broken Lizard's spring break thriller comedy spoof "Club Dread." It was all right, not nearly as funny as "Super Troopers" but still containing two or three brilliant gags and some hilarious songs by Bill Paxton's Jimmy Buffett-like beach-rock burnout.
There was, however, one thing in the film that rubbed me the wrong way big time, though I may be the only person in the whole country who noticed it. In the first scene of the movie, and once again about 40 minutes later, a character (played by Erik Stolhanske) appears in a sheriff costume referring to himself as "the fun police." That's not the problem. The problem is his costume- his "badge" is not a regular badge- it's yellow, it's shaped like a Star of David, and it's stitched to his shirt- an image most commonly associated, of course, with the Holocaust. Here's the picture, you be the judge.
Is it intentional? I don't believe it is; if such a gag popped up in something like "The Producers" I could understand, but in a beach/slasher parody, it just doesn't fit. I absolve the Broken Lizard gang of any malice, but shouldn't at least someone- a producer, a studio exec, a distribution person, anyone- have noticed the inadvertent presence of unmistakable Holocaust iconography, and thus suggested a wardrobe change?
Like I said, I went to see "Club Dread" to get away from all this anti-Semitism stuff...

Posted by Stephen Silver at March 1, 2004 11:59 PM
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