BROKEN LIZARD’S CLUB DREAD

½ (two and one half stars)

Scrappy good fun.

Running time: 105 minutes. Rated R (violence/gore, sexual content, language and drug use).

At the Empire, the Kips Bay, the Battery Park, others.

FOR those who like giggles with their gore, the very silly “Club Dread” provides a fitfully amusing distraction.

Like 2002’s “Super Troopers,” the previous outing from the Broken Lizard comedy troupe, this genre-busting hybrid is a scattershot affair – bad jokes land with a thud that seems to echo, but the winning ones prompt hearty laughs.

Between the intermittent gag crests, the camaraderie and zany good humor of the group – whose five members co-wrote and star – generate enough goodwill to keep proceedings humming along agreeably.

“Club Dread” is not a spoof of the horror genre à la “Scream”; rather, it uses a perfunctory slasher narrative on which to hang a stitched-together series of skits and off-beat one-liners, giving it the feel of a blood-drenched undergraduate revue.

Comedy and carnage make uneasy bedfellows, and the juxtaposition is played up with absurdities such as a killing spree punctuated by a reveler whooping, “Who wants to limbo?”

The plotless anarchy of spring break suits the designs of Broken Lizard, whose members play staffers at Pleasure Island Resort, a debauched, tropical party palace run by Coconut Pete (Bill Paxton), a rocker refugee from the ’70s whose biggest hit was “Pina Colada-Burg.”

Director Jay Chandrasekhar does double duty as the film’s funniest character, a dreadlocked tennis pro with a hilariously bogus British accent.

He’s joined by Erik Stolhanske as Sam, chief of the Fun Police; Kevin Heffernan as the newly arrived masseur with a magic touch; Steve Lemme as Speedo-sporting dive master Juan; Paul Soter as Coconut Pete’s drug-loving nephew; plus Brittany Daniel (“The Adventures of Joe Dirt”) as token hot blonde Jenny, a sex-crazed aerobics instructor.

When a machete-wielding serial killer starts slicing and dicing up employees, these core staffers must discover the identity of the killer – using clues found in a sea shanty Coconut Pete can’t remember recording – while keeping the murders a secret from the hard-partying guests.

Unencumbered by logic or narrative cohesion, the freewheeling lunacy of “Club Dread” sits squarely in the guilty pleasure zone.