Editorials
Hands-on with ‘Evil Within 2’, First-look at Gameplay!
When The Evil Within was announced back in 2013 with a live action trailer, I knew it was something special. A spiritual successor to Resident Evil 4 from Shinji Mikami – the series’ creator himself? I was instantly sold. While the game we got wasn’t genre-defining, I thought it was a pretty great survival horror game that did more than enough to stand out from Resident Evil. Needless to say, when The Evil Within 2 was announced during Bethesda’s E3 press conference this year, I was excited. After months of waiting, I got a chance to play the game last week, and I’m happy to report that what I got to play was a great follow-up to one of 2014’s best horror experiences.
The demo I got to play featured most of the game’s fifth chapter. Most of the psychological story had been set up and Sebastian Castellanos had already met the game’s Joker-esque antagonist, Stephano. The important thing to note is that while this game will feature more open-ended environments, the chapter I was playing is meant to highlight the improvements made on the first game’s tight corridors and overall combat.
I was dropped into Sebastian’s office, the sort of mental waypoint where you can take a breath, save your game and give Sebastian some much-needed upgrades. My Sebastian was a clean slate, and I was given a modest amount of upgrade materials to beef him up how I saw fit. After applying some weapon, speed and health upgrades, I traveled through the infamous cracked mirror into the game’s twisted world.
Immediately I was struck with strong Resident Evil 2 vibes. The level was set in a small town – just outside its town hall in fact – and it was gorgeously haunting. The entire set piece was full of deep shadows and washed in cool blues, with chunks of reality floating around in the sky above me. I took my first steps forward and stumbled straight into the demo’s first boss fight.
It shouldn’t come at any surprise, but the boss design in this game is stellar. The first one I fought was called The Guardian, and it was a hulking being made up of human corpses. It had a table saw for one hand, and it used a collection of heads that looked eerily like Samara from The Ring to see. The creepiest part was that the dominant head was constantly smiling.
The guy helping with the demo explained before I started that boxes held valuable crafting materials and ammo (sound familiar?) and that The Guardian just so happened to hate boxes. I laughed at the time, but once I started playing the first thing I did was lure The Guardian into an area of the tight combat arena full of wooden crates. Lo and behold, the boss stopped chasing me just to beat the boxes to pieces giving me some precious time to reload all my guns and circle behind it to get some cheap shots in.
That encounter highlighted a major theme of The Evil Within 2, the idea of giving you more options to survive during the game’s toughest fights. It’s hard to keep your cool when you’re being chased by a giant monster, but if you can manage to lure it into a gas puddle you can light it on fire. Or if you lead it through the trip wires scattered around, it’ll get stopped in a time warp for a generous thirty seconds. Basically what I’m saying is that these moments brought some innovation to a genre that’s been driven into the ground, and I loved it.
Fortunately, The Guardian wasn’t too tough to kill on Survival difficulty (the next notch up is Nightmare and the one below it is Casual), and I moved into the town hall where I was given the task of finding an emitter and activating it to stop the town of Union from collapsing. This was a crucial moment for me because even though I was jumping in at the fifth chapter, I knew exactly what was going on in the story which leads me to believe that hiring Deadgirl writer Trent Haaga to pen the game’s story paid off. The incapacitated character who gave me the task tossed me a walkie-talkie and sent me on my way.
The following ten-minute section was one that reminded me a lot of the first game despite some major improvements. The town hall was dark creepy and full of long corridors. These sections employed scare tactics that reminded me a lot of Layers of Fear. I would walk to the end of a hallway only to find the door locked and once I turned back around the world around me had shifted, sometimes slightly, making me wonder whether or not I was crazy. Other times the changes would be drastic. The hallways would stretch on for an eternity, blood would drip form paintings that would them slam to the ground. It was pretty cool and kept these sections interesting. Also, I really liked that when I went off the beaten path and creeped down the scarier hallways, I was usually rewarded with some good materials if it wasn’t part of the critical path.
After some exploring, I came across Stephano. He froze time just as I found the emitter and in an extremely tense moment used a giant blade to ever so slightly cut Sebastian’s face while he sat there unable to move. Texture-wise the face held up really well and the cut looked realistic enough to make me queasy. A little of the tension was lost thanks to shoddy lip syncing, but this moment really got to me so I was willing to forgive the animations’ shortcomings.
After the cutscene ended, I was introduced to the game’s second and final boss – Obscura. Imagine a lanky, creepy man with an extremely old camera for a head. Despite already being impressed by my fight with The Guardian, this fight showed the innovation that game director John Johanas’ two DLC chapters for the first game made a name for himself with. See, the emitter needed 90 seconds to activate but Obscura’s power was to stop time with its camera head. I figured out pretty quickly that this was a boss I wasn’t going to kill and that I was just trying to distract it long enough to activate the emitter. I wasn’t exactly out of ammo from my previous fight, but I wasn’t rich with it either so I equipped the crossbow and flung as many shock arrows as I could at the monster. It took a couple tries, but once I was able to beat it I let out my breath and got ready to move on. Unfortunately, the guy showing me the game tapped me on the shoulder and let me know I was done.
Even though I was already excited for The Evil Within 2, I wasn’t sure whether or not I would wait to play it since so many games are coming out around that time. This demo completely sold me on it, and I hope that the refinements on the first game’s problems on display in my demo are as apparent throughout the entire game. If you want to play The Evil Within 2 for yourself, you won’t have to wait long since it’s out this Friday the 13th of October on PS4, Xbox One and PC. Here’s hoping it makes its way to the Nintendo Switch sometime next year.
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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