As a brain-dead parody of a smart, subversive satire, Scary Movie would appear to be suffering from a singular level of miscalculation. But it wasn't the only lowbrow farce to hit upon the bright idea of spoofing Scream. Developed at roughly the same time as its blockbuster counterpart, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday The 13th covers much of the same comedic ground as Scary Movie in chronicling the exploits of sex-crazed teens living in slasher-plagued Bulimia Falls. Like Scary Movie, Shriek is less a sustained narrative than a glorified series of skits based on a central premise. Also like its better-known doppelgänger, it betrays an anxiety toward homosexuality not generally seen outside the work of Eminem, as well as a belief that pop-culture references are inherently hilarious and needn't be augmented by any sort of satirical slant. But where Scary Movie had a near-pathological commitment to offending its audience, Shriek seems content to be just another Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker-style gagfest aimed at 12-year-old boys of all ages and genders. As might be expected from a film that glowingly references Naked Gun, Shriek embraces a Hellzapoppin-esque, anything-goes approach that encompasses plenty of lowbrow humor, physical comedy, campy guest appearances, and corny visual and verbal puns. Where Scary Movie's pop-culture references were limited largely to recent phenomena, Shriek is willing to go back decades for its witless allusions, with one particularly retro sequence segueing from a Grease parody to a spoof of Christine. The film as a whole thankfully lacks Scary Movie's overbearing eagerness to shock and offend. But without it, Shriek is just another witless entry in a mostly regrettable genre that, among less heinous crimes, is responsible for keeping an increasingly unwatchable Leslie Nielsen in the public eye for much of the past two decades.