Review #304: Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth (2000)

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #21- Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth (2000)

Watch it here on Vudu! (You'll need a Fandango account but it's free to watch.)

A bit of a departure from what I usually review, this one might come as a bit of a surprise. If you've even heard of this movie (and/or if you've noticed that I'll be covering Scary Movie 2 tomorrow), you're probably asking, "Hey Gabe, why this one and not Scary Movie?" And that's a good question. Shriek If You Know... and Scary Movie are, by almost every metric, basically the same movie. And Scary Movie is, by almost every metric, the better of the two. But I like this one better, and almost nobody has ever seen this one- so I'm here to bring it to your attention and give it the attention (I think) it deserves.

Shriek If You Know is (like Scary Movie) a parody of late-90s pop horror, as well as a melting pot for every single pop culture reference they could fit into an hour and 26 minutes. The plot is (again, like Scary Movie) a mashup of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, following a group of high school students that are being stalked by a killer in a ghostface mask (ostensibly related to a car accident they got into the previous year, but not really). Unlike Scary Movie, the plot is really kind of incoherent at the end of the day- it's pretty much just a delivery method for jokes, and if you try to pay attention to the story it really doesn't even follow from one scene to the next. Which is kind of a bummer, but again, it's in service of the jokes.

And the jokes are really what this movie is about, for better and for worse. It might sound ridiculous but I actually think this movie has TOO MANY jokes, and the joke density is likely one of the reasons it didn't become popular like Scary Movie did- there are scenes in here that are literally so dense with jokes that you don't have time to even notice them all unless you watch it multiple times. (Which, if you like the film, you might do. But likely due to the lack of a coherent plot and some editing issues I'll get to in a moment, most people didn't.) Every single scene has dozens of jokes in the background, dialogue with double- and triple-entendres, running gags that always make me laugh, and jokes that are foreshadowed and called back to and yet still come as a surprise. On this watchthrough I was specifically paying attention to the backgrounds of scenes, and I noticed plenty of hilarious gags I had never seen even after countless viewings because it's just that dense.

It feels weird trying to describe the funniest parts of a movie through text to people who probably haven't seen that movie, but I'm going to list a few anyway. The scene at the beginning where Aimee Graham's character ("Screw Frombehind") deadpan answers the phone while being chased by the killer never fails to make me laugh. There's a shot where the five protagonists are walking through the courtyard of their school dramatically in slow motion, only for other students to walk past at normal speed, and I'm cracking up just typing that. The teacher taking role and calling out, "Sabrina? Moesha? Daria?" Main character Dawson goes to reserve a table at lunch and the host says, "Party of Five?" One scene turns into a Mentos ad as a character takes a moment to come up with a clever solution to escape the killer. The delightfully subverted pizza delivery slogan, "24 Hour Pizza, if we're not there in 24 hours, we're not coming." And of course, the scene where the killer is charging someone down in a car, where the camera dramatically cuts back and forth so many times that the speeding car never actually reaches its destination, is legit one of my favorite sequences in any movie ever.

As much as I love this movie, though, it definitely has some flaws. The editing is, to put it mildly, atrocious. So many of the aforementioned joke-dense scenes are ruined by weird gaps between lines (like, a character will say the setup for a joke as the group walks off screen, three or four seconds will pass as they transition to the next location, and then they'll give the punchline for that joke)- any comedic timing is gone, but it could have been easily fixed by just a bit of tighter editing. There's also at least one scene I can think of where the music and/or sound effects are so much louder than the dialogue that a joke is completely inaudible. (Specifically I'm thinking of when Hagitha Utslay is showing off her book, "Dawson Is A Murderer"- I think she's bragging about it getting picked up on Oprah, but to this day I don't know for certain because there's a musical sting that comes up wayyyy too loud and instead all you hear is Dawson reply something about "Chicken Soup for the Butt" which doesn't make any sense without that missing context.)

But, any flaws it has are easily papered over by the non-stop jokes that DO land. Why can't more movies have a scene where it inexplicably becomes a VH1 Pop-Up Video with factoids about the scene that's currently going on? (The obvious answer to that question, of course, is that Pop-Up Video hasn't been a thing for over twenty years. But come on.)

Anyway, I'm not sure what else I can say to get you to watch this movie, but I hope you do. Yes it's dumb. Yes Scary Movie is "better". But I think both movies have their merits, and man do I wish I could see a world where we eventually got Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth Part V. What a world that would be!

Overall Rating: 6/10 Killers That Never Actually Kill Anyone

Nostalgic Rating: 10/10 Cheap Shots, Lame Gags, and Dead Horses

Rising Star: I don't know how I never noticed this before, but on today's viewing I caught a running gag that I'd never seen. There's an actress in this movie (she is uncredited but according to IMDB her name is Elena Shuber) who shows up at least three times wearing incredibly tall platform shoes (which my wife loved when I pointed it out to her). She's easy to miss but if you pay close attention, each time you see her, the platform shoes are bigger than the time before, leading to a scene near the end where her platform shoes are so big that she meets an untimely end with a ceiling fan. Rest In Peace, Platform Shoe Girl!