Editorials
[Based on the Hit Film] Replaying ‘Jaws Unleashed’!
To this day I and many others have a fear of the ocean. That uncertainty about what could be lurking below you when you’re out there beyond the shallows. A helplessness born of being out of our element. The knowledge that there are things down there that might just graze a foot, but might also take a nibble at it.
This fear is probably more widespread than it should be because of that Summer of 1975 when a young punk named Steven Spielberg brought the terror of Jaws to cinemas and forever tarnished the rep of Great White Sharks and idiotic Mayors everywhere.
Bruce’s Digital History
Despite arriving at the infancy of video games, Jaws found itself in a digital form very quickly, albeit unofficially.
Atari had sought to license a shark-avoiding arcade game as a tie-in to the movie, but Universal Pictures did not accept. This did not stop Atari, who retitled it Shark JAWS (with the word ‘Shark’ deliberately made almost unreadable in the title) and published what is now believed to be the first ever movie tie-in video game (again, in a rather unofficial sense).
It would be another 12 years before we’d see ol’ Brucey in video game form, showing up on the NES in a loose tie-in based on the risible Jaws: The Revenge. It featured a snippet of John Williams score and focused on fighting not only the titular toothy one, but other angry sea creatures as well.
All adaptations followed one clear rule. It was the player vs the shark. It would be a staggering 19 years after the Nintendo Jaws title (and 31 years after the first Shark JAWS) before we had somebody turn around and say ‘Yeah, but what if you could be the shark?’
And lo, Jaws Unleashed was born, and the world was given a silly, over the top slice of shark power fantasy nonsense.
A Legend Unleashed
The developer to do it? Appaloosa Interactive, a developer founded in Hungary during the early 80’s and swimming in moderate success ever since on over 150 titles.
Appaloosa had experience not only with handling licensed game projects (The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Crossroads of Time, and South Park among them), but also with ocean-based action as it was responsible for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Ecco the Dolphin games, perhaps the developer’s most notable work.
Jaws Unleashed, in a reverse of Shark JAWS, started life as an unlicensed shark game known as Sole Predator before gaining the Jaws license. The game was to be treated as a sequel to the original film, set 30 years after Brody blew Bruce into so many chunks. If Jaws: The Revenge had seemed like a daft idea for a story, then Appaloosa was going all out to make it seem somewhat sensible when the absurdity of Jaws Unleashed’s plot was detailed.
Amity Island is now thriving, the population is higher than it has ever been and corporations such as Environplus are boosting the local economy. What a perfect time to be a shark. And guess what? You. Are. Jaws! Which one I don’t know. Must be the shark equivalent of ‘John Smith’ as far as names go.
Jaws (you) rocks up at Amity Island and promptly eats the son of Environplus CEO Steven Shaw. Naturally, Shaw is a bit miffed about this and employs a shark hunter to eliminate you. Thankfully (for Jaws, not the many, many people he’ll end up chomping on) Michael Brody (yeah, keeping it in the family) manages to capture Jaws (not until after a few passes at the seaside buffet have been made by the hulking shark) and thanks to his research as a marine biologist, he discovers that it’s because of the sonic emissions coming off Environplus’ submarines that are making sharks a bit grumpy.
In a homage to the original film/lack of creative thought towards the plot, Brody tries to convince the Mayor of the problem. Of course, the Mayor ignores the warning because what could be more Jaws than that? His Royal Chompyness naturally escapes (getting his chomp on with a captive Orca along the way) and the game opens up. You’re now a shark in an open world with a fast n’ loose remit for destruction and bloodbaths, the potential is giddying.
Dead in the Water
The reality was unfortunately not quite so. Jaws Unleashed was born a glitch-ridden monster, with conventional mission structure often shoehorned in where it shouldn’t be applicable (human tasks clumsily-applied to a sodding Great White Shark). It also suffered from being needlessly pedestrian far too often for a game about eating things as a giant shark.
Yet when Jaws Unleashed embraced its sheer absurdity, it rose above its failings admirably. What was absurd about Jaws Unleashed exactly? Well, you could upgrade Jaws. Not with +7 armor and a sword of Smileyasonofabitch, but with abilities. The toothsome one could learn how to do moves like the ‘Body Bomb’ where Jaws would fling himself into the air at a ludicrous height and bomb back down on a target. You had to keep eating to prevent your health from diminishing (on top of regular damage).
During the hours you spend with Jaws Unleashed, you’ll see a shark catch and throw an explosive barrel at an oil pipeline on purpose. The result of which is the complete destruction of an Environplus refinery. Jaws also obliterates an undersea facility, eats the Mayor and Shaw, and to top it off, survives having a bomb dropped on him, having already been in close proximity to several explosions beforehand.
The game is utter nonsense and a technical garbage fire, but there’s a strange charm to its shonky daftness that sort of holds up to this day (albeit for ten minutes at best). It’s a procession of admirably stupid moments. Moments such as seeing a shark flip and twist in the air like it was in SSX Tricky. Or having to work out how to use key cards (solution: eat the guy with the key card). Or simply causing insane amounts premeditated carnage despite being a supposedly regular shark. The battles with other sea creatures are of interest, at least in fleeting terms. Jaws gets to battle other sharks, an orca, a blue whale and a giant squid along the way.
Critics weren’t particularly enamored with Jaws Unleashed at launch. The average score on PlayStation 2 was an underwhelming 52/100 (pretty much awful in the strange world of video game scoring). That didn’t stop it performing well commercially. Jaws Unleashed closed in on half a million sales over three platforms.
Jaws Unleashed is also sadly the final resting place for its developer. After 24 years in the business, Appaloosa Interactive ceased operations shortly after the release of Jaws Unleashed in 2006. For a developer best known for the elegant undersea adventures of Ecco the Dolphin, bowing out with a crude, over the top tale of a vengeance-driven shark feels somewhat ungracious.
Editorials
Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’
After Scream (1996) made a killing at the box office, as well as won over critics and audiences, a lot of folks in the movie biz thought they could do the same thing (and yield similar results). That thing, of course, being a slasher. Most of these opportunists wound up being pretty straightforward; they were low on humor or commentary. Yet others, like Scary Movie (2000), saw the potential for spoofing Scream, and acted on that impulse with both haste and excitement.
A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.
A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References
Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.
Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.
Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.
Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.
Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?
“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.
We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.
It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.
Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody
Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th
Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.
Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.
Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.
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