AllMovie

Believe it or not, the sequel to incredibly lame horror spoof Saturday the 14th is actually a pretty OK B-movie. Where the first film just strung together a handful of tired creature-feature gags and hoped they'd all hang together, Saturday the 14th Strikes Back actually sports a surfeit of jokes, not all of them horror-tinged. Dense with throwaway gags -- including a running series of radio announcements parodying the then-current "Baby Jessica" toddler-in-a-well news story -- the film even features a few fun production numbers, including a song about the agonizingly limited culinary options available to your average neighborhood vampire. With its chocolate-chowing family of faux-sitcom cheeseballs, the script has plenty of goofy character roles to fill. Everyone from Doritos pitchman Avery Schreiber to sitcom vet Ray Walston and former Bad Seed star Patty McCormack proves up to the task. Star Jason Presson mostly plays it straight, but he gets choice bits of narration along the lines of "Aunt Alice was the only woman I ever met who could chew gum and eat chicken at the same time." Saturday the 14th Strikes Back throws a hell of a lot of jokes at the wall. But, unlike the tired gags that populated its predecessor, lots of them actually stick.