Fright Flashback: Parodies

Welcome to Popcorn Culture's newest feature, Fright Flashback! I'm trying to really get going on this whole "blogging" thing by watching at least one new 2014 movie per week for the rest of summer. Alongside this, every week I will be reviewing an old horror movie that shares a theme or genre with the week's big release, a sort of spiritual predecessor. Yes, I'm reworking an idea from Tim Brayton over at Antagony and Ecstasy, so don't say I don't cite my sources.

This week's new release is the Amy Poehler/Paul Rudd romantic comedy parody They Came Together. It's certainly not a huge wide release, but there's no way in hell I'm going to see Transformers: Age of Extinction of my own volition. As the first entry in this new feature, I will be reviewing a horror parody - Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th, because there's even less way in hell I'm subjecting myself to Scary Movie again.

Year: 2000

Director: John Blanchard

Cast: Harley Cross, Simon Rex, Tiffani-Amber Thiessen

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I've made a huge mistake. Anybody who willingly picks up a copy (or, in my case, loads on YouTube) of a movie with a title like this knows what they're in for. After being inundated with film after film of joyless "parody" the likes of Scary Movies 1-5, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Date Movie, Vampires Suck, Disaster Movie, Ad Nauseum Movie, as well as A Haunted House and its sequel, it's not difficult to ascertain the quality of this film and its humor.

These kinds of dirt cheap pop culture-laden "comedies" pop up on Netflix and RedBox a couple times a year to cash in on whatever the latest craze at the time happens to be. Unfortunately, as long as we keep giving them money, they will continue to thrive, multiplying and choking out other, better comedies like a kudzu vine.

There are only two of this entire mass of films worth noting at all in any capacity, however negligible. Sure, a film like Scary Movie has the historical value of being more or less the first of its kind (crappy pop knockoffs, not parodies) and the beginning of a long and unhappy franchise, but that doesn't mean it's valuable or deserving of note. In fact, it's quite emphatically not, an almost shockingly useless movie that would be reprehensibly offensive if it had any real personal influence over viewers aside from sucking in their money like a collapsing star.

The best of these, in my humble opinion, is 2001's Not Another Teen Movie, which had moments of genuine satire spliced in among the (sometimes literally) explosive amounts of scatological humor. The second best is the one we are here for today. Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th was produced around the same time as Scary Movie and as such is free of its mostly toxic influence. This doesn't mean the two films aren't similar in several very important ways, but the comedy here is much less mean-spirited and tends to fall on the "Oh, Grandpa" side of bad joking rather than the "I'm seriously considering scratching out my eardrums" bad humor of the Scary Movie franchise.

(I understand that there were and continue to be many fans of the Scary Movie franchise, to whom I impart no judgement. There is a way to enjoy just about anything, I just do not possess that capability with this particular set of films.)

There is, however, an easy way to enjoy this film.

SIYKWIDLF13 (holy crap, this is gonna be a rough ride) tells the story of Dawson (Harley Cross), a new student at Bulimia Falls High School. He quickly makes friends with a ragtag band comprised of Slab (Simon Rex, who got his start - and middle and end - in the gay porn industry), a dumb jock; Barbara (Julie Benz, who also played Darla in Buffy and Angel), the Sarah Michelle Gellar type popular girl; Boner (Danny Strong, also of Buffy and - holy crap this is the guy who wrote The Butler and is working on the screenplay for Mockingjay how did he get here), the sexless nerd; and Martina (Majandra Delfino, who continues her career in terrible comedy to this day, having appeared in the quickly aborted Van Der Beek sitcom Friends With Better Lives), who is about as clear an analogue to Clea DuVall's The Faculty character Stokes as a person can be without actively being in that movie.

A mask-wearing killer begins to strike down local teens (well, he tries, but dagnabbit if they always seem to die accidentally before he can get to them) and a hawkish reporter (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen) descends on the scene looking for the inside scoop. Obviously, much like Scary Movie, this film makes the incredibly strange decision to parodize Scream, which was already the sharpest horror satire of the 90's. Luckily the plot is hung on a Scream-like structure, but the jokes are all aimed at the more general 90's horror scene and especially the oeuvre of one Kevin Williamson.

They were more thorough in satirizing his entire career than he was in creating it.

Let's stay on that for a second, because that's where this film rises above all its brethren. While there are plenty of pop culture references in this film, they are much less odious than the "cram whatever movie is out right now haphazardly into a gag" mentality of those other films thanks to being unified under the umbrella of the remarkably prodigious Williamson. The best jokes arise naturally from this well of content (including, by the year 2000, Halloween H20, Scream, Scream 2, The Faculty, and I Know What You Did Last Summer) as well as the general slate of Scream knockoffs that dominated  the horror of the decade like a militaristic tyrant bent on demanding the sacrifice of scantily-clad starlets.

Aside from this, SIYKWIDLF13 has nothing exciting to offer. The performances are exactly what you'd expect from the direct-to-video crowd, although the level to which the actors aren't taking their roles seriously adds a little bit of texture and a sense of what I hesitantly call "fun." It rather feels like a movie I could have made with my friends in high school, had I gotten into the horror genre much earlier than I did. Which, incidentally, was only about three years ago. I work fast. Go hard or go home, as my grandmother always says.

So, yes. This film is not without its merits, although for obvious reasons these don't serve in any way to make it operate on a level that could quite be considered Good or Funny in any traditional sense. All I can say is that despite clumsily handled jokes about domestic abuse, homosexuality, and molestation, this film is much less tawdry and offensive than it could have been and for that it's worth the relatively high stature of second best.

When you check out the score, you'll see that's not exactly worth much, but hey. It's better than a swift kick in the groin.

TL;DR: Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th isn't good at all, but at least it's not Scary Movie.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1218

Forrest Butler

Year: 2013

Director: Lee Daniels

Cast: Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, David Oyelowo

Run Time: 2 hours 12 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

For those of you who think Mr. Daniels needs to get his ego in check, let me clear the air. Due to copyright issues with a 1916 silent short film, of all things, the production company was unable to use their original title, The Butler. Thus Lee Daniels' The Butler was unceremoniously shoved into existence, and it is an enormously cumbersome title that I shall only use as a mark of solidarity to the poor filmmakers who were saddled with it.

Written by Danny Strong (who most notably played Jonathan on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's hard to tell if this is a step up or a step down), Lee Daniels' The Butler is ostensibly based on a true story. Yeah, so is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Adapted loosely from the life of White House butler Charles Allen, basically the only element they retained was that he was a butler. Oh, and he was black.

Well, we're off to a good start.

People have been up in arms about this film's dubious depictions of certain presidents and historical events to which I respond "duh." It's a historical film about how terribly black people were mistreated in America. The details are gonna be fudged a little to emphasize the emotion rather than 100% accurate historical fact. And anybody who thinks Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last words were about how awesome butlers are probably also thinks that Leatherface is still out there in a nursing home somewhere.

The film follows Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), a man who was born on a plantation and watched his mother (Mariah Carey who doesn't open her mouth once, thankfully) raped and his father killed by a white landowner (Alex Pettyfer, and a role that is essentially pure evil still doesn't stop me from wanting to make out with him). This super slavey narrative takes place in 1926, and correct me if I'm wrong but that one does feel a little off to me. 

Anyway he is taken in, taught how to serve in a house, and eventually makes his way to the whitest house of all (in more ways than one) serving a variety of stunt casted actors wearing prosthetics. I mean... American presidents. Here's where the Forrest Gumpiness really kicks in as Cecil serves his way through critical presidencies and his son Louis (David Oyelowo) finds his way smack dab into the middle of the Civil Rights movement.

And some pretty fantastic hairstyles.

Louis sits in at Woolworth's, Freedom Rides, hangs out with Black Panthers, and is even in the hotel room with Martin Luther King the day of his assassination. The length to which Strong reaches to cover every last expanse of the movement leads to a scattershot narrative led by events and setpieces that are not so much defined by the world of the movie as they are by the audience's previous knowledge of history.

If you sat a six-year-old, or perhaps a foreigner with little knowledge of American history in front of Lee Daniels' The Butler, all the meaningful lingering shots and presidential imitators in the world wouldn't help them decipher the main storyline. The script relies heavily on narration (Come on, Danny Strong! I trusted you!) and meanders through history from the Eisenhower presidency to Nelson Mandela, eventually skipping freaking decades to the 2008 election.

Now for all the flaws and mostly generic filmmaking in LDtB, it does get its point across. White people were truly awful to black people in America. Even today, that message has value and is an important thing to remember. This is where we came from. Slavery, segregation, and the KKK aren't just fairy tales from a long forgotten time. Some of this stuff happened less than half a century ago. The film's depiction of the atrocities committed against the black community are immediate and affecting in a way that makes one realize history isn't just in books. This all played out on the national stage and there are people alive today who saw it happen.

And one scene in particular stands out as the Greensboro sit ins are intercut with a White House dinner party. This artistic touch shows finally that there was somebody alive behind the camera with a few tricks up his sleeve. Only a few, but at least they're there.

So the movie isn't boring, no not at all. It was quite engaging in terms of raising awareness despite its flaws as a narrative. On the backs of Whitaker, Oyelowo, and Oprah Winfrey especially as Cecil's put-upon wife Gloria, the film is elevated above what could have been a tepid and thoroughly mediocre affair.

As if She would put her support behind something subpar. 

TL;DR: Lee Daniels' The Butler is generic but its depiction of historical events make them more real than any textbook.

Rating: 6/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Catch it on Netflix when it comes out in a year, you won't mind missing it in theaters.

Word Count: 853