13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
My kind of comedy horror spoof, July 25, 2001
While watching the Showtime free preview weekend, I caught a glimpse of the Scary Movie trailer. It looked liked a funny parody, so I rented it. Big mistake. If I had known about the extreme use of gross-out humor before hand, I wouldn't have touched it with a ten-foot-pole. As it was, I ended up being sorely disappointed and disgusted by the movie. There was very little in the movie that I found funny.
Yesterday, I found myself looking at the box for Shriek at a nearby Hastings. Fears of it being just like Scary Movie almost kept me from renting it. Fortunately, I didn't listen to those fears but, instead listened to my inner desire to locate a funny horror movie parody. After watching just 10 minutes, I knew that I was in for a treat.
Sidenote: A common misconception among viewers seems to be that Shriek ripped-off Scary Movie. The truth is, Shriek was produced before Scary Movie was.
Warning ***** Might contain some SPOILERS.******
This movie is silly slapstick in the vein of Spaceballs and Airplane. It spoofs so many different movies, including: Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Shining (TV mini - There is a scene that seems to parody one from the Shining book and the TV mini-series between Horace Derwent and the guy in the wolf mask. As well as, the common "redrum" and topiary.), American Pie, Christine, Grease, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, etc. Not to mention some non-movie spoofs, in fact, two of my favorite moments were the Mentos parody and the Pop Up Video.
A delightful treat for those who enjoy silly slapstick. If you enjoyed Airplane and Spaceballs, you might want to give this one a look see. Personally, I give it a grade of 4 out 5 stars.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Scary Movie's" biting satire without the raunchiness, February 10, 2002
I first saw it on the USA Network and thought it was slapstick hilarious, especially the multiple reenactments of the infamous "I Know What You Did Last Summer" car-impact sequence. Not only does it slam slasher flicks, but also hammers WB teen soap operas as well as genre parody; for example, "Scary Movie's" not-gay-but-promoting-the-stereotypes-anyway character Ray gets spoofed in the form of the character Martina, who also spoofs Jamie Kennedy in "Scream" by laying down the law on the mechanics of a genre parody movie. Another bit of hilarity is the background inserts of the Killer ducking in and out of the crowd randomly murdering people and nobody notices. While it does have some bad sex jokes, mostly revolving around the "American Pie" reject (...) ("It's pronounced 'Bonner,' sir." "Not from where I'm sitting!"), they're significantly cleaner than anything found in "Scary Movie."
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Before the "Scary Movie" Franchise...there was this..., November 28, 2006
This film pioneered the spoofing of horror movies before the "Scary Movie" franchise took over with a bigger budget and better writing.
Admittedly, this film is not as good at creating a parody of the horror film genre, but I'm not entirely sure it was trying to. It is very entertaining in it's own way, but it obviously has a smaller budget and less-than-perfect writers (I'm redundant, I know).
On the plus side, this film does make fun of a lot of things that the "Scary Movie" franchise left out, which is awesome for us fans of this style of comedy. It obviously has a different approach and film style than the more popularly known "Scary Movies". One of my favorite scenes is towards the end when they do a "pop-up video" parody on the big chase scene which inevitabley happens at the end of every horror movie. I used to love Pop-up video in the 90's, and it was so awesome to see it again!
All in all, it's a fun film for fans of scary movies, but not quite as well-made as the "Scary Movie" movies.
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