Members Club opens with a ‘No Dogging’ sign, and middle-aged Geoff (David Schall) pulling up alongside it precisely to dog. This being the horror genre – albeit horror comedy – the transgression of any rule will be met with brutal punishment, and in this case, our Geoff is lured to another car only to find himself, mid-wank, being violently sodomised with a wooden fence post and then having his tongue removed with pliers and knife. Not long afterwards that tongue will be reanimated through an incantatory ritual conducted by Christine (Emma Stannard) – not that we yet see her – who then opens an envelope addressed to her with a photo inside of Wet Dreams.
Wet Dreams are a quartet of male strippers – Alan (Dean Kilbey), Neil (Perry Benson), Ratboy (Marc Monero) and Carly (David Alexander). They may have been big in the Nineties, but now they are flabby, middle-aged has-beens who struggle to attract any kind of female audience, and whose manager ‘Double Dip’ Deano (Liam Noble), himself an ex-stripper with an anatomical anomaly, is throwing in the towel. Alan takes over, but it is clear that their days are numbered – but then an extremely well-paying gig suddenly emerges at a club out in the Essex hinterlands, and they take the bait, walking, like Geoff, into a diabolical trap where they are to be part of a sacrificial ritual designed to resurrect the local sixteenth-century witch Agnes Whitewood.
Witchcraft stories typically deal in othered women taking on their male oppressors and sticking it to the prevailing patriarchy. Yet while the reincarnation of Agnes to her full power involves the emasculation of Wet Dreams – literally so, since the ritual will be complete only when she succeeds in literally severing all four men’s penises, half the joke of Members Club, whose very title involves a pun on male genitalia, is that these performers are long since past their peak, and represent rather shabby specimens of manhood. Alan is also a patriarch in a different sense as a failed father to student Daisy (Barbara Smith), and will, while variously trying to evade or confront the witch, also have to renegotiate his relationship with his estranged daughter, and with his own advancing years. This forty-something adult still has a lot of growing up to do, and is constantly outclassed by his daughter as he once was by his late wife.
Writer/director Marc Coleman’s follow-up to ManFish (2022) represents an implausible merger of Peter Cattaneo’s The Full Monty (1997) and Benjamin Barfoot’s Double Date (2017). There are surreal cameos from Steve Oram as a one-eyed ‘ex-amateur darts player’, of Peter Andre as a sleazy Greek Adonis who is actually called Adonis – and who is the root of Christine’s man-hating – and of Alan Ford as the voice of a talking cheese and pineapple hedgehog (some crudités amid all the crudities) – and there is even, in the end, a graphic full-frontal appearance made by Deano’s well heralded (prosthetic) double dong.
Incongruity rules here, as the supernatural is banalised, seductive moves are thoroughly de-eroticised, and everyone is made to look grotesque and absurd. Only in the very end, after Alan has repeatedly embodied all the most harmless, craven, clueless and pathetic aspects of masculinity, is he allowed – in a briefly jarring moment – to assume the kind of ugly, hateful murderous male aggression that easily turns the most helpless and vulnerable of women into witches.
Members Club had its world première at FrightFest 2024 on 24 Aug
