"I Know What You Did Last Summer" joins "The Spy Who Shagged Me" and "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" as being yet another film that doesn't even come close to living up to its inspired title. All are bad enough to make me angry at the thought of a good title being squandered.
Kevin Williamson's script suggests nothing so much as a man trying, and failing, to capture the charm of the first couple of seasons of "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" - this is more obviously a good description of "Scream", but "Scream", and this may surprise some people who've seen it, is better. -Or maybe he wasn't even trying. I'm not sure which is worse. I think Williamson WAS trying for a quality we might term "cred", by having his central characters bitch and squabble all the time. Friends in "Buffy", on the other hand, genuinely support one another. That's a large part of the show's charm. It's a charm that could only have helped Williamson's script, if only by making it more realistic: however much his central characters might have fought amongst themselves in the ordinary course of events, faced with a powerful EXTERNAL threat, they would surely have closed ranks.
Neither this nor "Scream" is particularly bad. The main trouble is that "I Know What You Did Last Summer", as well as wasting a good title, also wastes a good premise. Some teenagers feel guilty after their car accidentally knocks someone down; they hide the body and then they THINK they can just safely sneak back to their old lives ... the story could have gone in many good directions from here, and it's a pity all that occurred to Williamson was to head for regions slasher-horror so well travelled I'm surprised they don't sell souvenirs.
