Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is a 2000 comedy film that parodies the teen slasher flicks of the 1990s, primarily Scream (1996) and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
It was made with relatively little money, but still contains quite a few recognizable actors. It stars Tiffani Thiessen, Tom Arnold, Julie Benz, Coolio and Simon Rex, with a cameo by David Herman.
Released the same year as the first film in the Scary Movie franchise, Shriek was sent Direct to Video to avoid lawsuits. The film was quickly overshadowed by the other parody, but gained a semi-cult following.
Provides examples of:
- Acquitted Too Late: Parodied in the I Know What You Did Last Summer segment when one of the teenagers flashes back to his own sin. His older brother, who's on death row, handed him a letter and asked him to pass it on to the Governor because it would prove his innocence, but his little brother was too much of an asshat to do it on time.
- Angst? What Angst?: Parodied and invoked by Officer Doughy.Well, that about does it. I killed my cousin, my heart is broken, my sister’s dead. Dammit I love this job.
- Apathetic Citizens: More of apathetic students. See Unusually Uninteresting Sight.
- Appeal to Force: A pizza guy loses his company clothes in a game of strip poker. He hesitates, so Officer Doughy whips out his gun and gives the guy a Death Glare.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. Screw runs into a bug zapper and electrocutes herself, leaving a grid pattern burnt into her face. Barb dies from an allergic reaction to bee stings and her face becomes red and swelled up.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: In a segment at the end of the film blurbs start appearing informing you about bits of random trivia, and parts of the production. One of the pop-ups offends the killer, so he stabs it, causing another that says "Ouch" to appear. The film crew is even acknowledged in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
- Butt-Monkey: Boner.
- The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House: Spoofed when the killer stumbles into the backyard pool while menacing a girl over the phone.
- Casting Gag:
- In the Japanese dub, Martina is voiced by Michiko Neya, who both voiced Sidney Prescott in Scream, the very movie this film parodies to, and Cindy Campbell in the Scary Movie film series, which is both an Expy of Sidney, and not to mention the films also parodies Scream as well.
- The same goes in the Latin American Spanish dub, as Hagitha Utslay is voiced by Yolanda Vidal, who also voiced Gale Weathers, another reporter, in the first Scream film.
- Character Catchphrase: "I'm never gonna get laid", much to Boner's everlasting regret. He does though, by a transgender paramedic on the way to the hospital at the end.
- Cat Scare: Lampshaded, as the cats in question are called "Cheap Shot", "Lame Gag" and "Dead Horse".
- Chainsaw Good: The killer uses a chain saw to attack Boner, who dies of a heart attack before the killer can even use it on him.
- Covers Always Lie: No, Tiffani Thiessen doesn't play the main character, nor is she the killer.
- Dark Secret: All five of the main characters have some secret the killer lords over them. Martina forgot to give her grandmother her laxatives, Boner forgot to mail a letter that would've saved his brother from the electric chair, Slab smoked his uncle's ashes, Barb ripped the tag off a mattress, and Dawson engaged in pornographic acts with a mountain man while dressed in a deer suit.
- It looks like EVERY student at the school has also got one.
- Dawson Casting: All the actors portraying teenagers are in their mid-to-late twenties. This is lampshaded.
- Disney Death: Boner dies of a heart attack... but is alive and mostly well when he's carried off by the paramedics at the end.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Mrs. Tingle lectures her class about how Frankenstein (1931) and the Holocaust are connected.
- Don't Explain the Joke: The movie, which is either a parody of a parody or a parody of a parody of a parody (depending on whether you think it's a parody of Scary Movie or just a parody of Scream) has a scene similar to the one in Scream (1996) where the Genre Savvy guy actually explains to a loungeroom full of teenagers all the rules about horror movies, in which the redhead girl explains all about Parodies and how they work.
- Dramatic Unmask: Parodied, as the villain has so many masks that the characters unmasking him eventually grow bored and the unmasking itself stops being dramatic.
- Dude, She's Like in a Coma: This is how Boner ultimately decides to lose his virginity. He's killed before he gets a chance to rape the girl. The fact that his actual first time turns out to be with a trans person is probably a case of Sexual Karma.
- Everybody Calls Him "Barkeep": The killer is only ever referred to as... the killer. In fact, during one scene where the killer tries to run over Slap, he gets pulled over by the police and pulls out his license which has "the killer" listed as his name.
- Everyone Is a Suspect: Parodied endlessly.
- All five major characters admit that they have good reasons why they would want to kill at least one of the other four, but none of them are the killer, who is hiding out right under the table they’re convening at.
- Also, for no apparent reason both Doughy and Hagatha are wearing the exact same boots as the killer, while the principal has an exact match of the killer's entire outfit just lying around.
- Boner casually mentions that he could kill all his friends if he wanted to, eliciting concerned or shocked looks on their faces. Then in a spontaneously upbeat tone he says that of course he wouldn't.
- Dawson is accused of having killed his entire family, and the others dumped him in the sea while he was wearing a deer costume, mistaking him for a real animal.
- Evil Overlooker: Parodied. The killer is shown above the other characters on the cover, but his expression is too goofy to be anything close to threatening.
- Evil Twin: The killer turns out to be Doughy's evil twin cousin.
- Farts on Fire: A cabin blows up when the hillbilly resident lets one rip in front of the fireplace.
- Feet-First Introduction: The masked psycho killer is first seen walking into frame wearing a very distinctive pair of boots. This is a set-up to a later gag because multiple unrelated characters are also wearing this type of boot.
- Funny Background Event: Both visible and audible (the PA announcements).
- Hockey Mask and Chainsaw: Played with. The killer starts out wearing a hockey mask, but this morphs into the Ghostface mask when he accidentally catches fire. Later he totes a chainsaw to kill someone.
- Hollywood Heart Attack: Boner dies of one.
- Hulking Out: Subverted. After Slab takes way too many steroids his veins start bulging, he grows an enormous unibrow, his shirt rips... and his head explodes.
- I Call Him "Mister Happy": Doughy refers to his penis as "Thor's Hammer." He believes that the Big Dipper is this for the constellation Orion.
- I Love the Dead: The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue mentions that even though Barbara is dead, every once in a while a passerby has sex with the corpse.
- Innocent Innuendo: It seems like Boner is having sex with a girl, but it turns out that he's dramatically clipping his toenails.
- Joke Name Tag: A series of cats jump out at people, wearing name tags like "Cheap Shot" and "Lame Gag".
- Left the Background Music On: Martina and Dawson run right past the band performing the song used for the Scooby-Doo-esque chase scene. They even stop to dance to the song for a little while.
- Mattress-Tag Gag: The characters are shown to have thrown a man hit by their car into the sea, but interpret threatening notes about it as being for other minor misdeeds. This ends with a girl accidentally pulling off a mattress tag in the middle of sex. With the local priest.
- Meaningful Name: Played straight and defied with Martina.
- Meta Guy: Martina, who spouts off a list of things that one would encounter in a parody movie à la Scream (1996)'s Randy.
- Multilayer Façade: When Dawson and Martina subdue the killer, they unmask him to reveal another mask. They continue for some time, accumulating a pile of masks on the floor, until they get to the last one and they (finally) find his true identity: Doughy's identical cousin Hardy.
- New Transfer Student: Invoked with Dawson, who even gets a sign sticked to his back saying "New Kid".
- Noodle Incident: Nurse Kevorkian's rant about sex and her own sexual history starts with her mentioning something that happened in a Denver bus station, and ends with her saying "and that's how I knew I wasn't a lesbian". Everything inbetween was cut by Barb's flashback.
- Not Quite Dead:
- Lampshaded. The killer gets up at the end, but Doughy kills him one more time by shooting him yet again, remarking "Not on my watch!" Even after this the killer is still alive, and runs off. According to the epilogue he settled down, and a new killer took up his guise to menace the town.
- It appears that Boner dies of a heart attack, but at the end he's being wheeled away into an ambulance. He tells Martina and Dawson that he overdosed on Viagra, so even though his heart stopped the blood kept pumping.
- Once Done, Never Forgotten: Dawson was accused of murdering his entire family while he was supposedly at camp. Hagatha wrote a pop-up book about it called "Dawson is the Killer". It doesn't help that it got rave reviews from Oprah.
- Pizza Boy Special Delivery: Lampshaded by Doughy when Hagatha runs off with the pizza deliverer.Pizza boys get all the pussy.
- Pop-Up Trivia: The "Chop-Up Video" chase scene. It's unclear whether all of the production references are fake or not.
- Punny Name: Where to begin? One of the more subtle ones announced over the high school speaker is Mike Hunt.
- Raging Stiffie: One of the teens appears to die of a heart attack, but it's later revealed that he'd taken an entire bottle of Viagra in anticipation of a sexual encounter, and the raging erection kept his heart pumping.
- Rule of Funny
- Running Gag:
- Every time a main character gets a note from the killer, it read "I know what you did last (insert event)". The thing is, every flashback, regardless of the date, has them coming back from a sausage festival and accidentally hitting a plastic deer with their car. They then toss it into the sea and agree to never speak about again. In Dawson's flashback, he's the one they hit, dressed like a deer, and the other four toss him into the sea.
- There is a girl that every time she appears is wearing taller and taller shoes until her final scene where she walks into a ceiling fan.
- To the killer's obvious frustration, teens whom he's trying to kill keep dying from random mishaps before he gets the chance strike.
- Sex as Rite-of-Passage: Boner spends the entire movie trying to get some. At one point, he spontaneously declares that the protagonists should make a pact to lose their virginity before graduating. Everyone turns him down simultaneously (but Slab O'Beef agrees). At lunch (oysters, natch), he laments that roofies aren't getting him laid when he takes them (Slab opines that he's not taking enough). Even when it looks like he's getting some at the climax, it's all sight gags to illustrate Martina Martinez's rules of a parody situation. A Hospital Hottie jumps him for his Gag Penis as he's being loaded into an ambulance. The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue reveals that she's a post-op trans woman; Boner doesn't care.
- Spoofed the Ironic Film Seriously: This movie received some of the same criticism as Scary Movie for parodying a movie that's already meant to be a satire. Sometimes mistakenly referred to as a parody of Scary Movie in turn (a parody of a parody of a satire?), Shriek is actually an original spoof of Scream and similar movies which just happened to have been created around the same time.
- Sounding It Out: Parodied with one character literally sounding out the death threat the killer left him simply because he's an illiterate drunk. He gives up when he gets the word "Chanukkah" out of "I know what".
- Soundtrack Dissonance: Nearly every "suspense" scene is backed up by cheerful pop songs from The '80s.
- Teacher/Student Romance: Between the French teacher and a random student, who even fathered her kid.
- Team Power Walk: Parodied when the main cast is shown doing this and others walk around them at normal speed and wonder what's wrong with them.
- Timmy in a Well: Done when Lame Gag, one of the Cat Scare-parody cats, meows to Dawson and Martina, evidently to warn them that Slab is OD-ing on steroids. And then gets into an argument that ends with Dawson telling the cat to fuck off.
- The Trope Formerly Known as X: Coolio's character The Administrator Formerly Known as Principal.
- Too Dumb to Live: Parodied and invoked. Everyone agrees that with the recent killings they should hide out at a safe place – but they all think it should be in the middle of nowhere, preferably the dark woods in the pouring rain, and without any adult supervision or police protection in the near vicinity. One even suggests that they should go to a deserted place that's been abandoned ever since a bunch of dorky kids were dismembered there.
- Unreliable Narrator: Played for laughs with the teenager's memories of the night they accidentally drove over a Fisherman and dumped his body. The Alpha Bitch remembers everyone swooning over her, the Jerk Jock remembers how impressed everyone was by his posh intelligence, and the Casanova Wannabe remembers the girls throwing themselves at him.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
- The killer murders dozens of people in the background, including three of Hagatha's cameramen, yet no one notices or even cares. He even takes it to an absurd level by wearing scuba gear, cowboy gear, and crossing guard gear, complete with a stop sign, over his Ghostface costume.
- The Administrator-Formerly-Known-As-Principal is utterly apathetic when he witnesses a satanic ritual sacrifice taking place in a teacher's lounge through one of his security cameras.
- Vulgar Humor: The mountain man from Dawson's flashback dies after he farts at the fire place, causing the cabin to explode.
- Waxing Lyrical: After the killer is revealed to be an evil identical cousin.Doughy: Whereas Hardy enjoys a minuet, ballet ruse and crepes suzette.
Hardy: Doughy likes to rock n roll, a hot dog makes him lose control.
Hagitha: What a wild duet.
Martina: Still they're cousins.
Dawson: Identical cousins.
Martina: They laugh alike.
Dawson: They walk alike.
Martina: At times they even talk alike.
Hagitha: And you can lose your mind.
Hardy: Shut up everybody! For god sakes, how many times do you think we've heard that in our lives? - "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: "Slab's doctors say he'll be dead for a long time."
- Wolverine Claws: Parodied on the box cover, in which a copy of Freddy Krueger's bladed glove instead sports spoons and other cutlery at the ends.
- Your Head Asplode: Slab's head explodes from a steroid overdose.
