I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (Columbia/Mandalay) Starring: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Brandy, Freddie Prinze Jr., Mekhi Phifer, Matthew Settle, Muse Watson. Screenplay: Trey Callaway. Producers: Neal H. Moritz, Erik Feig, Stokely Chaffin and William S. Beasley. Director: Danny Cannon. MPAA Rating: R (violence, profanity, drug use, adult themes) Running Time: 96 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER seems like exactly the kind of film at which SCREAM and SCREAM 2 took their satiric jabs. In this sequel to last fall's horror hit, Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) is still traumatized after surviving a killing spree by a gortex-clad, hook-handed, vengeance-minded psycho (Muse Watson). A year after the events in the first film, she's terrorized again -- this time on a tropical holiday with her college roommate Karla (Brandy), Karla's boyfriend Tyrell (Mekhi Phifer) and a classmate named Will (Matthew Settle) with a crush on Julie -- in all the expected ways. People begin dying in reverse credits order. Shadowy figures flit across the background. Small creatures dart out to the accompaniment of blasts of music. The electricity goes out. The killer moves...very...slowly towards potential victims. And no matter how violently the killer meets his apparent demise, he always turns up to suggest yet another sequel.
Aside from its chronologically-challenged title -- if this is happening a year after the first film, shouldn't it be I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID TWO SUMMERS AGO? -- I STILL KNOW SHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER is constructed with an almost benign predictablity. Yet in a way, that's the appeal of the teen horror film. There's nothing truly scary about the film, nor was there ever intended to be. It's a Halloween funhouse with spaghetti for intestines and peeled grapes for human eyeballs. There's nothing dehumanizing about the way characters are gleefully dispatched, because they're never meant to be any more human than a mannequin being decapitated. You scream because it's what you're supposed to do, and you laugh about it afterwards.
That doesn't make it any more fun for the average viewer of voting age to watch a film where you can identify every twist or turn several minutes before it happens. This is the kind of film you go to for only one reason: you're a teenager, you're on a date, and you're ready for an excuse to grip someone tightly. You're not going for the chance to see Jeffrey Combs' demented turn as a hotel manager with an attitude. You're not going to care about the inane attempts to give our protagonists actual personalities. You're certainly not going to care about the silly dialogue, or the less-than-terrifying prospect of Julie becoming an ultraviolet McNugget while locked into a tanning bed. You'll pay your money for a hug and a shriek, and you'll get exactly what you pay for.
If I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER didn't feel as long as its title by the time the credits finally roll, it might have warranted even more slack. After all, it's a genre film doing what a genre film is made to do. It's also a film which feels blasted into production on a shaky premise with virtually no attempt at creating a quality product. It might seem strange to see a film like this after SCREAM turned its kind into comic relief, but there's still an audience for this sort of grind-it-out funhouse ride. I'm not it, but you know who you are.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 endless summers: 4.
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