Criminally Inane

Let’s take a brief break from the horrors of Halloween to kick back, relax, and laugh before diving straight into more killer classics. Here’s a couple mini reviews of flicks that prove I’m not demented! Maybe.

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!

Year: 1988

Director: David Zucker

Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, O.J. Simpson

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A bumbling member of Police Squad! uncovers a lot to assassinate the visiting Queen Elizabeth.

I live for David Zucker comedies. Airplane! Is my favorite non-horror movie of all time, and his absurdist stylings just tickle me wherever I can find them. That said, The Naked Gun is not my favorite entry in his sprawling canon of spoof movies, though it is assuredly very good. My current working theory is that, as a movie version of the pre-existing Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker series Police Squad!, the writers were a smidge too familiar with the material to give it that extra sparkle.

However, please remember that my complaining is completely relative. The Naked Gun is still a damn sight better than most of the mangy pups the studios call comedies nowadays. It’s a relentlessly upbeat marriage of cop movie tropes and zany slapstick, a subversive and ribald genre picture that clearly adores the films it’s skewering. Perhaps my somewhat muted appreciation for this film comes from the intoxicatingly high level of that Stooge-esque slapstick, a form of comedy that fails to completely resonate with me. But the fact remains that it’s being perpetrated by experts of the craft, and I have nothing but respect for that.

Plus, it’s not like The Naked Gun doesn’t have a dozen other outlets for humor. A ZAZ picture is like an immense pipe organ. The air pressure that builds up can be releases through a huge variety of valves and avenues, but they still coordinate to make beautiful music. Or at least “Yakety Sax.” Among the irresistible subversions of generic clichés (even the partner cop’s own wife calls him “Nordberg”) and general buffoonery (an attempt to kick down a door sends a cop’s leg smashing ineffectively through the paneling) are subtle background gags (a sign on a building that says merely “The Police Station”), sly double entendres, choice celebrity cameos, and just plain inimitable line readings (Ted’s forlorn “Why?” after being hit with a tranquilizer dart).

So, yeah. It’s funny. And it wouldn’t be half as funny as it is without the grave, deadly earnest Leslie Nielsen at the helm. The key to terrific comedy is characters who don’t realize that they’re being funny, and Nielsen’s background in self-serious B-movies (including our very own Prom Night – we can’t escape the Halloween season) perfectly matches him to this kind of material.

Nielsen approaches each and every scene with such confidence and gravitas that it’s incessantly surprising when it all falls to pieces. His performance also keeps the central plot in focus, preventing the attention deficit that oh so frequently scuttles similar parody movies. Or, you know, unfunny wrecks like Meet the Spartans or Vampires Suck that we all thought were the pinnacle of hilarity back in middle school.

The only place where the movie falls truly flat is the baseball stadium finale, which has too many narrative switchbacks to properly follow the plot and acts as a showcase for the film’s least effective gags. At this level, “least effective” would still be funny in any other movie, but here they’re just too typical to match the dizzy heights the film has set for itself.

The bottom line is that The Naked Gun is funny 99 percent of the time. It might not always be funny in ways that I personally appreciate, but that doesn’t prevent it from worthy entry into the pantheon of spoof classics. Surely you can’t object to that.

Rating: 7/10

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

Year: 1982

Director: Carl Reiner

Cast: Steve Martin, Rachel Ward, Carl Reiner

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Rigby Reardon is a private eye investigating the possible murder of the father of a local femme fatale.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is one of my all time favorites comedies. Not only is it a ribald send-up of classic black and white detective flicks, it pits Steve Martin’s Reardon against character from real film noirs, expertly cutting him into footage from scores of old films. It’s not often that you find a spoof comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Veronica Lake, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, James Cagney, Joan Crawford, and Vincent Price. It’s true they’re not exactly in on the joke, but that’s a killer cast, to say the least.

Though some of the continuity editing is a little shaggy DMDWP’s construction is awe-inspiringly tight, utilizing matching sets, clever dialogue cuts, and blended color schemes to create one continuous, totally viable film. And although some of the comedy does come from structural humor (non sequiturs present in the borrowed dialogue, absurd match cuts), the best thing about it is that it’s genuinely funny in its own right. The spliced-in footage might be a gimmick, but it certainly isn’t what keeps the movie afloat.

Just as film noir exists in a heightened reality where everything dark and grimy about the human condition is amplified tenfold, DMDWP subverts that charged atmosphere, using it as a springboard into the heady heights of ludicrous absurdity. The movie bends the rules of reality, making every act – from brewing a pot of java to flirting with a woman to talking about cleaning women – a bold triumph of ecstatic silliness.

And my oh my is it startlingly lewd. Maybe some of the raunchier jokes just seem amplified by the film’s apparent vintage, but either way they work like gangbusters. Just like Leslie Nielsen, Steve Martin’s über-serious work here informs the hyperbolic parody, though he’s certainly a touch more aware of himself as evidence by his mugging for the camera. Luckily he finds a counterbalance in Rachel Ward (of Night School – thank you, Halloween spirit), whose every word drips with sheer, oblivious sincerity. Perhaps that might be all she’s capable of, but boy does it every work wonders in this particular context.

The humor of DMDWP is sterling and pretty much untouchable, but the film’s not entirely flawless. In the second act, it gets a little too caught up in its own mystery. The joking abates for brief periods while it delicately lays out its oddly complex system of clues and suspects like they’re fragile china on a tea tray. Because of the sheer mass of threads and characters plucked from other movies, the storyline never quite makes sense, and the intricate algorithm required to keep them glued together only mucks up the narrative works something fierce.

The film settles down once it simplifies itself again in the finale, but for a while, it’s merely a string of funny gags dangling precariously from a single loose plot thread. But damn are those gags entertaining as hell. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is an utterly singular comedy that, if you haven’t seen it, I’m marvelously proud to have introduced you to. Go to it now. I want to kiss this movie with every lip on my face.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1220

Beerly Departed

Year: 2015

Director: Tomm Jacobsen, Michael Rousselet, Jon Salmon

Cast: Alec Owen, Patton Oswalt, Greg Sestero

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

In the interest of full disclosure, it might benefit you to know that I donated to the Kickstarter to bring Dude Bro Party Massacre III into this world, and if you believe that this will bias my review, so be it. Also in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I didn’t like the movie very much. I have nobody to blame but myself.

A little bit of background: 5-Second Films is a YouTube comedy group that – for a period of several years – released a short comedy video every single weekday. It was an exercise in bite-sized Internet absurdism, sometimes clunky, sometimes gut-splittingly hilarious. Over time they began to attract the attention of other famous personalities, and they’ve worked with people as varied as BriTANick, TomSka, Weird Al Yankovic, Larry King, and Patton Oswalt.

One of their videos, a short slasher parody about a bunch of exaggerated frat guys, eventually expanded into a full parody trailer. From there they got the idea to make their very first feature film: a full-scale slasher parody ostensibly recorded from a lost midnight movie broadcast in 1989. They’re not the first to have this sort of idea.

Slasher parodies have been attempted before, to varying degrees of success: One of the very first, 1981’s Student Bodies, is a shrill, sophomoric effort, but where it goes right is in skewering the already hoary tropes of the nascent subgenre: overuse of holidays and anniversaries, virginal Final Girls, and desperately gimmicky kills. The 1996 satire Scream perfected this angle, tossing teens who knew the genre inside and out into a typical slasher scenario. And the mockumentary Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon flipped to script to terrific effect, showing how a wannabe killer manipulates the scenario to create his own movie. On the other hand, where flicks like Scary Movie and its endless bevy of sequels failed lies in an overreliance on cheap pot gags and pop culture references so instantly dated that they even make the Baha Men roll their eyes. This same fate befell films likes Shriek if You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and a host of other pseudo-comic bandwagoners.

In short, a slasher parody can be successful, but only to the degree to which it actually genuinely engages with the material it’s parodying. That requires research. That requires dedication. That requires focus. That requires…

More than five seconds.

DBPMIII tells the story of the Delta Bi fraternity, which has survived two previous attacks from Motherface (Olivia Taylor Dudley, known for such classy horror titles as Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension and Chernobyl Diaries), a hideously burned house mother, and her revenge-seeking daughter. Now somebody else has donned the Motherface mask and slit the throat of the only survivor of the two previous massacres, Brock (Alec Owen). His twin brother Brent (Alec Own) arrives on campus to infiltrate the Delta Bi’s – led by the handsome and totally not too old Derek (Greg Sestero of The Room) – and solve his brother’s murder while the frat parties it up at the old sorority house by the lake.

Meanwhile, the Police Chief (Patton Oswalt – somebody bake this guy some cookies, he’s a damn good friend for agreeing to be in this) sends the nerdy Officer Sminkle (Brian Firenzi) to the lake as a virgin sacrifice to end Motherface’s rampage on the pretense that the Delta Bi’s are secretly bags of oranges and that by bopping them on the nose he can return them to their true form and end Chico’s orange crisis. …Yeah.

I paid for this movie.

I suppose it was probably too much to ask that the guys who do five second online videos make a masterpiece 90 minute feature right out of the gate. That’s be like asking a fortune cookie writer to pen the next great American novel. Or asking Michael Bay to make a movie that passes the Bechdel test. But much like their YouTube channel, it hits as often as it misses. DBPMIII is full to the brim with zany experimentation and cinematic risk-taking like no comedy I’ve ever seen, and I wouldn’t trade that sense of gung-ho adventure for the world, but I dearly wish the results were more coherent.

I mean, really? Bags of oranges?

It’s an immensely frustrating film, and a pristine example of Newton’s Third Law of Film Comedies: For every great joke, there is an equal and opposite sucking turd: For every moment that toys with the mechanics of film in an interesting, clever way, there’s a dancing attic robot. For every opening montage that deftly summarizes an infinitely gorier, more hilarious slasher flick that supposedly came before, there’s a bag of oranges. And then the film finally has the f**king audacity to turn its goddamn orange gag into one of the best postmodern surrealist jokes of the entire godforsaken affair and I weep bloody tears of sheer hubris.

God help us all.

The biggest issue with Dude Bro Party Massacre III is that it has no identity. Is it an 80’s slasher parody? Or is it an absurdist Internet comedy film? Being both is not an option. The eras are mutually exclusive. So the film drifts by in a flux of indecision, dipping a toe here and there where it sees fit. I’ve already splanted my flag in support of films that embrace their slasher leanings, and this one is no different. When DBPMIII is operating at its unequivocal best is when it’s wholeheartedly engaging with the genre, like a pan-searingly funny gag poking fun at ominously foreshadowing song lyrics. And the film is at its spoon-gagging worst when it forays into the broad, spasmodic realm of online humor, from whence crawls the film’s most abhorrent character, the beer-crazed party boy who’s so unfunny he sucks the fillings right out of your teeth.

Unfortunately – funny or not – the entire film is unforgivably marred by a flabby second act which is a full, deathless slog populated by an endless parade of useless character moments. Which, ironically, is the single thing that it has most in common with the average 80’s slasher.

At the end of the day, Dude Bro Party Massacre III is not an unfunny film. At any rate, I’d toss it a couple extra points just for an out-of-the-blue Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead reference. But watching it is like panning for gold. To find your nuggets, you have to sift through the silt, and there’s just so damn much of it.

TL;DR: Dude Bro Party Massacre III has its moments, but its attention span is too poor to sustain the hilarity.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1135

Census Bloodbath: Die Laughing

Year: 1981

Director: Michael Ritchie (credited as Mickey Rose)

Cast: Kristen Riter, Matt Goldsby, Jerry Belson

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The assertion on the poster of the lackluster 1981 slasher Student Bodies that it is "the world's first comedy horror movie" is patently untrue. Films have combined the two genres with varying degrees of success since very near the inception of cinema itself with films like 1925's Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde (my, how the more things change, the more they stay the same) or The Old Dark House from 1932. 

However, this being Hollywood in the 1980s and all, we should naturally take any declaration with a grain of cocaine. Student Bodies does appear to be the first feature film to parody the nascent slasher genre. The film was released almost presciently in the biggest year of the slasher Golden Age, just 16 months after Friday the 13th changed the game. The next film to parody the subgenre (National Lampoon's Class Reunion) wouldn't come out until almost a full year later, proving that for all its lack of vitality, Student Bodies was remarkably ahead of its time.

Those looking for an explanation should search no further than the 1981 Writers' Strike, which led to the hasty assemblage of the film from a variety of out-of-work crew members, many of whom would opt to use pseudonyms. In fact, this film was so hastily assembled that producer/director Michael Ritchie misspelled famous Hollywood nom de plume "Alan Smithee"as "Allen" in the opening titles. When you can't even spell your own fake name, the idea that you can create an entire feature film from scratch becomes a little suspect. So the fact that Student Bodies has as much to like as it does really says something, but a whole movie can't operate solely on pity. Ergo, we review.

But do we have to?

Student Bodies opens exactly the way it has to, with a scene that earned the film tens (maybe even dozens) of die-hard fans by being a near pitch-perfect parody of the "babysitter in peril" genre. The screen fades in and out on a shot of a house as the subtitle changes from "Halloween" to "Friday the 13th" to "Jamie Lee Curtis' Birthday," then we watch as a girl chats on the phone about how "I have a feeling this is the last time I'll ever baby-sit," gets a series of heavy breathing phone calls, is half-strangled by her boyfriend as a prank, goes upstairs with him to bone and then gets murdered with the unlikeliest weapon possible: the killer passes up a rope, an axe, and poison in favor of a box of paper clips.

It's again oddly prescient in terms of the fact that slashers in 1981 weren't quite so desperate for ideas that they resorted to crazy gimmicky killings until a year or so down the line. But other than that, it's a more or less perfect bawdy take on the trials and tropes of the genre from Halloween all the way on down to When A Stranger Calls.

However, the film's sense of humor is more or less killed off along with its opening couple. There are a couple decent gags down the line, but few of them relate in any way to the horror subgenre being lampooned and even fewer elicit anything more than a wan chuckle. But more on that later. For the time being, we are stuck with Toby (Kristen Riter) - a Final Girl so pure and virginal that she has a big button reading "NO" pinned to her blouse (one of the few gags that has any juice past the ten minute mark).

If they sold these at conventions, I would own a dozen of 'em.

Toby watches as various pairs of her friends sneak away from the day's events to form the beast with two backs and are subsequently killed off. Her constant helicoptering around the doomed couples leads several local authorities to believe that she is the murderer, so she sets off on a quest to discover the true culprit and clear her name, dragging her boyfriend Hardy (Matt Goldsby) along for the ride.

As time goes by - and the one scene that makes up the second and most of the third act is repeated endlessly - the somewhat decent gags begin to putrefy and decay into a dull, nonsensical roar. Student Bodies might be aiming to be an Airplane! for the slasher crowd, but with sophomoric, non-genre related gags (the killer disguises his voice through the ass of a rubber chicken; the mentally challenged Janitor pees blood; a blind black kid named Charles Ray makes friends with a kid in a wheelchair and they both proceed to catcall women like a horny, juvenile Greek chorus) it barely even surpasses Not Another Teen Movie. At the very least, there's no joke involving a waterfall of fecal matter, so we're still in safer territory than the parodic dreck of the 2000's, thank goodness.

Many of the gags are of a piece underwritten and over-explained, favoring loudness over comedy. But the lack of quality humor just means that it's one more drop in the bucket of dreary 80's horror, all of which were made for cheap thrills, not a true love of the genre. There's not even any bared bosoms or extravagant gore to mock the more tawdry ambitions of its target films.

In fact, the kills are perhaps the most disappointing element of the bunch. When describing the ludicrous murder weapons to a slasher fan ("Paper clips! Trash bags! An eggplant!"), they're sure to become suitably aroused (the brain part, not the pants part), but each and every kill is edited in a tumultuous flurry, rendering optical cognition impracticable. 

Think of each kill as the back half of that sentence. They start off strong (ie. the killer grabs an eggplant and marches toward an unwary victim), but become so obscured by flashy trickery that they might as well not have even happened at all. Generally a pair of characters will be killed so swiftly and efficiently, their bodies will be instantaneously teleported to the nearest crowd to save people the trouble of discovering them. This makes no sense within or without the film, but between you and me I'd rather go without the film.

This review is already funnier than the movie.

The one shining beacon in the film is the odd, akimbo janitor Malvert, played by a mysterious, double-jointed comedian known only as The Stick. His dialogue is truly dreadful, but his pendulous arm-swinging is captivating, providing a shot of the truly strange into a most mediocre affair. His arms have more star quality than the rest of the cast combined (many of whom never appeared in another film), but they're not enough to entirely spruce up a film that has the audacity to end with an "it was all a dream" moment but forget to include any jokes at the expense of that cliché.

But a dim 80's comedy is better than a dire 2010's Adam Sandler comedy, I suppose. The least I can say is that when you're watching Student Bodies, the time passes quickly enough. But the endlessly dull repetition wears woefully thin. There are some decent jokes at the expense of slasher tropes and The Stick is a sight to behold, but other than that there's no gore, no nudity, and not enough laughs to recommend the film to the average viewer. Two boobs down.

Killer: Principal Peters (Joe Talarowski) & Miss Mumsley (Mimi Weddell) - In Real Life: Hardy (Matt Goldsby)

Final Girl: Toby (Kristen Riter)

Best Kill: The woodshop teacher convinces the killer to stop pursuing him with a buzz saw, instructing him to turn it off and put it back in the case, but - having presumably saved himself - is then killed by being smacked with the case.

Sign of the Times: The Real Life version of Scott is encumbered with a truly unfortunate red neckerchief.

Scariest Moment: Toby runs down a hallway pursued by the teachers in odd costumes, then the reanimated corpses of her friends.

Weirdest Moment: The woodshop teacher has a fetish-like predilection for horse head bookends, and his room is filled to the brim with them.

Champion Dialogue: "Please, don't be so formal. Call me daddy."

Body Count: 15 1/2 - the poster is a big fat liar.

1. Julie is stabbed to death with paper clips.
2. Charlie is smothered with a trash bag.
3. Bertha is violated with a horse head bookend.
4. Joe is smothered with a trash bag.
5. Dagmar is killed with an eggplant somehow. 
6. Ralph is smothered with a trash bag.
7. Mawamba is smothered with a trash bag.
8. Joan is choked with a chalkboard eraser.
9. Al is smothered with a trash bag.
10. Patty is stabbed in the head with the prom queen crown. 
11. Scott is smothered with a trash bag.
12. Mr. Dumpkin is bonked on the head with a buzz saw case.
13. Principal Peters is stabbed with a trophy.
14. Hardy chokes on a glove.
15. Toby is strangled by Hardy in real life.

   15 1/2. Toby squashes a fly. 

TL;DR: Student Bodies is a loud, sophomoric comedy, but at least it has several gags that will get the goat of any slasher fan.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1551

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