Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth (2000)

Directed by John Blanchard [Other horror films: N/A]

I have to admit that I didn’t go into this one with the best mindset. Though I’ve seen this parody movie before, it’s been a hell of a long time, and never having been much a fan of the comedy from Scary Movie, I didn’t think this rewatch would go that well.

And of course, surprising me, I found that I enjoyed this one a bit more than I thought. By no means is Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth a great movie, but it did have it’s amusing portions, and I will fully fess up to laughing a decent amount throughout the film, and more so, it parodies films such as Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer generally well.

Just to spout off a few of these, a girl calls her brother (this film’s answer to Dewey) a “dork,” to which he replies, “dyke.” Cue another girl (who is suspected to be a lesbian) to ask, her voice interested, “What?” It’s quick, it’s simple, but it still cracks me up. Or how we get multiple flashbacks from different perspectives of what each of the central characters are hiding (“Seems gene splicing is all the rage”), which was sort of clever.

Some of the humor shines through simple quotes (such as “24 Hour Pizza – if we’re not here in 24 hours, we’re not coming” and a student overhearing a teacher ask “Do you know where I can get an unregistered handgun?”), while others from just wacky scenarios (such as the Mentos parody, complete with the cheesy music, or the race between the killer and Majandra Delfino’s character). I think what got me the most was, during a “Greased Lightnin’” parody (“Greased Frightnin’” should you be curious), a stupid fucking dance this guy was doing. It was just so goofy.

So sure, maybe the humor here isn’t sophisticated (that German Club “Seig Heil” for instance), but about 45% of the time, it works. That doesn’t mean the other 55% isn’t without merit – it’s still a goofy, watchable parody, as I suspect most of the Scary Movie sequels tend to be (I have actually seen the second, third, and fourth, though I barely remember a thing about any of these).

As far as performances go, I only really want to bring up Majandra Delfino because she rocked the short hair look (and actually, briefly reminded me of Brittany Murphy in Cherry Falls). The others were decent – Harley Cross was sort of generic, but Simon Rex was fun, and Danny Strong was certainly something – but no one stood out like Delfino. Tom Arnold was sort of painful, as was Tiffani Thiessen, but that’s just the nature of over-the-top parody characters, so I don’t fault them for this.

And while I generally found the final twenty minutes the least engaging in the film, I did rather dig the song that played during a chase scene, being “Pretty in Pink” by The Grown Ups (a cover of the Psychedelic Furs song). This sequence was, I’m guessing, a parody of some video pop-up-facts-type thing from MTV, and was generally amusing (“The actor playing Dawson is afraid of heights. The director got him drunk and dared him to do the scene,” is one that I laughed at).

This isn’t my type of movie, and I definitely found some portions trying and not particularly amusing. All-in-all, though, it wasn’t a bad watch, and though I found it below average, I honestly sort of found some of this worth it.

6/10