5 Hilariously Bad Horror Movie Rip-Offs

Ahhh rip-offs. We all love ’em, don’t we? Walk into the DVD aisle of any supermarket and you’ll find such brilliance as Chop Kick Panda, AVH: Alien vs Hunter or Tappy Feet. They’re the type of movies you may open on Christmas day after your grandparents foolishly believed them to be the movies that the DVDs themselves so clearly wish to be.

If there is one genre filled with more mockbusters and rip-offs than the rest, it is horror. You know what they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and in a genre filled to the brim with the likes of The Paranormal Incident and Pet Graveyard, there are some gems to be found in the bargain bucket.

Reaching into the deepest darkest depths of your physical media collections (or streaming services) and pulling out the most offensively obvious rip-offs known to man can be a fun activity. So, in this Movie List from The Film Magazine, we have done exactly that. These are: 5 Hilariously Bad Horror Movie Rip-Offs.

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1. Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th (2000)

Tagline: It’s a Scream!

Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is an odd one in that it rips off Scary Movie which, as a spoof, is ripping off hundreds of other movies. So, technically, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is a rip-off of many other movies like Scream, Child’s Play, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and more. 

Apparently the writers of Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th, Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms, were originally writers on Scary Movie but were fired early on. In a move similar to the A Bug’s Life and Antz productions, the two writers decided to go elsewhere and write their own movie following pretty much the exact same story, plot, parodies and jokes of their more popular brethren, Scary Movie.

The problem is that they couldn’t just completely copy Scary Movie, so they had to write all new material that was ever so slightly different from that seen in Scary Movie. Granted there are some funny gags, such as a barrage of knives to fall out of a student’s locker and for no one to suspect a thing, but for the most part Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is the kind of movie that you’ll find funny if you’re a fan of bad dad jokes (perhaps one of the best of these is a parody of pop singer Prince in the character of the school Principal Interest or “the Administrator-Formerly-Known-As-Principal”).

Ultimately, it is clear that this movie was made only in an enraged attempt to steal back any fame that Scary Movie may have achieved, and it is pretty obvious that by the time they started writing the creative well had run dry. There are some good gags but for the most part Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is just a more crude, loud and obnoxious version of Scary Movie.

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