By Geno McGahee
It is not easy to find a good horror parody. SCARY MOVIE is the most notable of the attempts to poke fun at the genre and get some laughs, but, in most cases, these movies fall flat. Most parodies aren’t very good and with the onslaught of bad ones like DATE MOVIE, DISASTER MOVIE and EPIC MOVIE, I wasn’t too excited to watch SHRIEK IF YOU KNOW WHAT I DID LAST FRIDAY THE 13TH, but since it was a horror-based one produced at basically the same time as the original SCARY MOVIE, I thought I would give it a go.
It is spoofing the big horror films of that time with SCREAM and I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER as the targets, but it follows SCREAM more than anything else. Dawson (Harley Cross) is a new kid in school and he befriends a group, but he has a dark history. Sleazy reporter, Hagitha Utslay (Tiffani Thiessen) wrote a pop-up book about Dawson and how she believes him to be a killer.
In the meantime, a ghost-faced killer is going around and doing some stupid things, but also trying to kill people. The group of supposed teens get notes regarding what they did last summer, which was basically hit a deer along with some other silly thing like tearing a tag off of a mattress or smoking the ashes of a dead relative. They vowed to keep the secret but now it’s coming back to haunt them.
Doughy (Tom Arnold), a mall security guard, teams up with Utslay to figure out this mystery and Arnold is naturally funny. Although this film struggles along with many lame and unfunny attempts at humor, you can’t help but to like and support Arnold. In one of the funnier scenes, he elects to play the drums outside and has an extremely fat friend dancing to the beat, dancing faster as he plays faster. I found that scene very funny.
The film follows SCREAM pretty closely and is as good a parody as the original SCARY MOVIE, but it’s nothing special. There was initially a plan to release it theatrically but SCARY MOVIE beat it to the punch and it went straight to video, and that was probably a good thing. This is not a quality film and cannot be compared to the parody films like AIRPLANE and THE NAKED GUN.
SHRIEK IF YOU KNOW WHAT I DID LAST FRIDAY THE 13TH is worth a watch if you enjoyed the time when the SCREAM theme dominated the horror genre. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible either. I got a couple of chuckles along the way. No laughs, but certainly chuckles.
Rating: 4.5/10