It was because of Scary Movie’s monster success that this other Scream parody existed, yet also skipped theaters and went straight to video. I never thought I’d say this, but perhaps Scary Movie did the nation a favor.

While Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th follows the same A-to-B pattern as Scary Movie, parodying many of the same scenes and even using some of the same jokes, it’s not as funny as its predecessor, which, quite frankly, isn’t exactly a laugh riot itself.

Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, looking pudgy and threatening to squeak out of her strapless blouses, has the Courtney Cox role as a sexpot reporter to Tom Arnold’s doofus of a security guard. It’s pretty sad when someone like Arnold makes the rest of the cast look like amateurs — including a pre-Dexter Julie Benz — but it’s true. Cameo appearances are put in by Academy Award winner Shirley Jones and, on the other end of the spectrum, rapper Coolio.

Aside from the obvious references to Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer and the entire teen-horror genre, Shriek also includes nods to entertainment as varied as Baywatch, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Porky’s, Reservoir Dogs (providing one of the film’s two true laughs), The Incredible Hulk, Mission: Impossible, Child’s Play and other movies far better than this one. —Rod Lott

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In The Munsters’ Revenge, the first made-for-TV movie from the beloved 1960s sitcom The Munsters, the Munster family gets its revenge. Aw, shit, I just spoiled it.

Anyhoo, the Munsters have an afternoon outing to the all-new Chamber of Horrors, where the wax figures include the Wolf Man, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Munsters themselves. However, the figures are actually robots programmed to embark on midnight crime sprees — the brainchild of one appropriately named Dr. Diablo (Sid Caesar, who jabbers and yammers as if members of the Great Depression generation may be watching).

After the city is terrorized, Herman (Fred Gwynne) and Grandpa (Al Lewis) are wrongly accused and thrown in jail. Their cellmate (Airplane! jive talker Al White) has an Afro comb and a bad attitude — he calls Herman “honky.” Post-escape, Herman and Grandpa try to convince the authorities of Dr. Diablo’s master plan to pull a heist of Egyptian artifacts on Halloween. The cops won’t have any of it, except for the young one (Peter Fox, Mother’s Day), but only because he wants in the pants of Marilyn Munster (Jo McDonnell, The Octagon).

Padded with a worthless trip to Transylvania and creating a running gag for in-town Cousin Phantom of the Opera (Bob Hastings), this act of Revenge directed by Don Weis (The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini) is pretty predictable, right down to where the commercials appeared. But it’s not without its amusing bits, such as when Herman destroys the police station because a bee flies up his sleeve. Or when Lily decorates their Halloween tree with bottles of poison. Or when Herman is shocked with 2,000 volts, causing steam to shoot out his ears. Why, yes, I was easily amused. —Rod Lott

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Not to be confused with the 2006 Christina Ricci flop of the same name, this Penelope is a charming star vehicle designed to exploit the fact that the camera loved Natalie Wood in a way we mere mortals will never know. Like many romantic comedies from the era, the film exists less as an excuse to tell a compelling story than to showcase its star in a never-ending series of fetching outfits. By that standard, Penelope’s a hit, with Wood never looking better.

Thankfully, the rest of the movie is pretty entertaining, too. Wood plays the title character, a bored banker’s wife whose previous attempts at creating excitement by stealing from her wealthy peers culminates in her robbing her own husband’s bank. She confesses her crimes to her tortured analyst (a pre-Producers Dick Shawn), who has little success keeping his love for her a secret. On her trail is clever police detective Peter Falk, who becomes just as smitten by his chief suspect as everyone else.

Directed by Love Story‘s Arthur Hiller, Penelope is one of those divine, cotton-candy concoctions that only could have come from late studio-era Hollywood. The script manages to be sly and occasionally sophisticated, while also remaining broadly funny. The fun really begins when Penelope confesses her crimes in order to save a falsely accused streetwalker, and no one believes her. This leads to a brilliant scene where Lou Jacobi and Lila Kedrova try to blackmail her by linking her to the yellow Givenchy suit she wore during the robbery (I told you the crime-com took her wardrobe extremely seriously), only to become frightened and confused when she’s thrilled to discover such evidence exists.

A flop when it was released, Penelope is much better than its vague reputation suggests. If it were simply a good excuse to watch its gorgeous star given the full-on Hollywood-glamour treatment, then that would be enough. That the result is genuinely fun to watch is just more icing on a perfectly decorated cake. —Allan Mott

It’s getting to the point where people are making more postmodern meta-commentaries on the horror genre than they are making actual horror films. But that’s not a complaint. The whole reason I love the genre is because of the opportunities it allows for smart-asses to mess around with it. Which explains why I loved Tucker & Dale vs. Evil as much as I did. When it ended, I knew that it suffered from playing the same note over and over again, but I loved that note far too much to give anything resembling a fuck.

It helps that the film takes on the one horror cliché I truly, truly, truly hate with all of my heart: asshole victims. For a horror film to be frightening, a filmmaker must provoke empathy, not disgust. Make us care about your characters and we’ll tense up whenever they’re threatened. Make us loathe them and we’ll happily cheer on the maniac who’s supposed to scare us. Problem is doing the former is a lot harder than the latter, so most filmmakers don’t even bother to try.

Tucker & Dale takes on this cliché by turning the frat-asshole douche-cunts horror movies typically expect us to care about and making them the villains. Our heroes are the titular friendly buddies, whose lack of style and social pretensions could be confused from a distance as something out of Deliverance. Both are in the woods to work on Tucker’s fixer-upper of a vacation home, but when they fish an unconscious coed (Katrina Bowden of TV’s 30 Rock) out of the river, her idiot friends assume they’re kidnapping her, and accidentally kill themselves in various gruesome ways trying to “rescue” her.

From the beginning, it’s easy to see where the film is going and it never deviates from that path, but that doesn’t stop it from being a really fun time. Most of this is due to the wonderful performances by Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine as the title characters. Both bring a sweetness and innocence to their roles that make them every bit as sympathetic as a horror movie victim should be. —Allan Mott

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Some filmmakers find their creative niche early and stick with it to the end. Take Jeremy Joe Kronsberg, who catapulted to Hollywood fame as the screenwriter behind one of Clint Eastwood’s biggest hits, Every Which Way but Loose (or, as it’s better known, the one with the fucking orangutan.

Unfortunately, Kronsberg was screwed out of the sequel, Any Which Way You Can (aka the other one with the fucking orangutan), so he decided to get even by writing and directing a movie that upped the ape ante to the power of three. In place of one of the world’s biggest movie stars, he cast the dumb boxer guy from TV’s Taxi and teamed him up with the short rude guy from — and this seems like it probably wasn’t a coincidence — TV’s Taxi.

In Going Ape!, Tony Danza plays a ne’er-do-well con man left in charge of a trio of redheaded primates after his circus-owning father passes away. If he can successfully tend to them for three years, he stands to inherent a $5 million fortune; if not, he’s shit out of luck. Helping out is Danny DeVito, his father’s Italian (?) assistant, and Stacey Nelkin, his super-cute, super-stacked girlfriend who breaks up with him at least 10 times in the course of the picture. Also along for the ride is Jessica Walter as Nelkin’s MILF-y mom, who’s mostly there to rile up DeVito and be robbed of her dignity.

Most of the nominal plot is spent on incompetent attempts by various interested parties to harm the apes, climaxing in a hospital chase sequence. A scene involving an attractive female cadaver seems completely out of place in a movie that should have been aimed at the youngest of children, but is too simultaneously adult and juvenile to appeal to anyone. Going Ape! flopped so badly, Danza had to wait eight years before headlining another terrible feature (She’s Out of Control), but he fared better than Kronsberg, who never earned another IMDb credit. —Allan Mott

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