I Know What You Did Last Summer

So I might not like this movie as much if I were watching today for the first time. My opinion is biased by the fact that seeing this in the theater was just about the most fun I've had at a movie. That nostalgia is part of what I enjoy about it, but there are other good elements as well. For one, I like Jennifer Love Hewitt as a scream queen. Actually, that might be it. It's not big on story, the performances aren't anything special, and the kills are pretty tame. I'm giving it a seven based on my personal enjoyment of it, but I'm not recommending it for horror fans for the reasons stated above.

The best part of this film comes with the opening credits, when we hear Type O Negative's excellent rendition of the cheesy old Seals & Crofts song "Summer Breeze." Unfortunately, the song soon ends and the movie starts.

This film bears little resemblance to the book upon which it was based, which is a shame because the book was really quite good. The book was about four teens who strike a young boy with their car, accidentally killing him. The boys' older brother tracks them down when one of the girls sends flowers to the funeral. It was a story about taking responsibility for your actions, and about the different (and extreme) ways that guilt and grief affect us all. The movie version, however, scraps all that and gives us a hook-handed slasher who cannot be stopped and will not die. It's Jason Voorhees on the beach.

The teens are all flawlessly beautiful and perfectly one-dimensional, although Jennifer Love-Hewitt does try to convey a severe case of guilty conscience and mostly succeeds. The story quickly becomes ridiculous as crabs are stuffed into the trunk of a car and then inexplicably disappear (I suppose if you were H. P. Lovecraft, this might be considered scary) and one girl is subjected to the spine- tingling terror of a professional haircut while she sleeps! Oh god, the horror! The Fisherman (wow, what a terror inspiring nickname - next we'll have the Mailman or the Burger Chef, I guess) stalks silently through the film in his yellow rain slicker and floppy hat, impaling people on his silver steel hook. And I didn't care about any of the victims. Granted, you're not really supposed to care much about the characters in a film like this, but this is far from innovative stuff here; there's just nothing to appreciate. I was bored silly with this one. Give me Friday the 13th any day.

During the 4th of July holidays, four teens Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Barry William Cox (Ryan Phillippe) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.) are driving after drinking on the beach. Barry distracts Ray as he runs over a guy on a desolate road in the middle of the night. They argue convincing Ray to dump the body. Max (Johnny Galecki) drives by but Julie lies to him. The body has a hook for a hand but he's not actually dead as he makes a final grab at Helen. The friends agree to keep it a secret after dumping him in the harbor. Then one year later, Julia comes back to town from college and she gets a note with "I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER!" Helen is working for her sister Elsa and broken up with the jerk Barry. Barry suspects Max as the one who wrote the note. Ray is now a fisherman following his father's footsteps.

The movie has some of the best young actors of Hollywood at the time. Kevin Williamson works over the script. It's a pretty simple teen slasher movie. It has some psychological aspects and mystery of the note. In the end, it's slash and splat. It works well and gets a couple of passable scares. It never really gets truly gritty or realistic. It's just an old fashion slasher flick. It's all about the old fashion 80s kills.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is an obvious attempt to cash in on the big success of the Scream movies. Compared to them and many of the other horror classics (Halloween most notably), this movie just does not measure up, but it is still entertaining. There is a sense of mystery here that really hasn't existed in slasher movies since the first Nightmare on Elm Street. You don't know who the killer is and he's always hiding in the shadows until... you know. This movie is far from perfect but entertaining.

"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.