I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER A film review by Andrew Hicks Copyright 1997 Andrew Hicks
(1997) ** (out of four)
Also known as, I KNOW WHAT MOVIE I SHOULDN'T HAVE SEEN LAST NIGHT. Kevin Williamson got the world on a platter when the horror comedy he wrote, SCREAM, grossed more than $100 million with its willingness to flip the bird to horror cliches while at the same time embracing them. Now comes Williamson's follow-up, I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, which skips the ironic humor and just sticks with the cliches instead. I can hardly wait for SCREAM 2.
Williamson gives us four main characters straight from the horror mold. There's brooding Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt, filling the Williamson quota of one beautiful "Party of Five" girl in every movie he writes -- now that I know Neve Campbell and Hewitt are both on the same show I might have to make it a party of six every week), the smart, responsible one. On the opposite end is Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar, TV's vampire slayer Buffy), the town beauty queen, in the movie to scream and show off cleavage. Her boyfriend is Barry (Ryan Phillipe), football quarterback and all-around stud. Rounding out the group is Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.), Hewitt's boyfriend and the artistic, freakish type.
We meet these four on the fourth of July, during their South Carolina fishing town's big celebration. They all drink, party and make out like all horror movie teens do, and are on their way home when disaster strikes. A man runs into the path of their car and gets creamed. Chaos ensues, with Ray not wanting to go to prison, Billy drunk and revealing psychotic tendencies and Hewitt trying to talk some reason into them. The decision is made to dump the body in the river, and they consent, promising they'll take the secret to their graves.
But, and this should come as absolutely no surprise, someone knows what they did last summer. Julie gets a note with nothing but the movie's title written on it (talk about shameless self- promotion!) when she comes home from college next year. As the guilty party, she rounds up the other three, who are still languishing around town, and they try to figure out what's going on. Here's what's going on -- there's a slasher killer on the loose, someone who dresses up in a fisherman's slicker and kills people with a meat hook. This is the person who knows what they did last summer, and you'd think these kids would just send him a note back saying, "I know what you're doing right now." I mean, the guy's a freakin' murderer.
Like SCREAM, Williamson tries to make I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER into a murder mystery. There are three main suspects -- David from "Roseanne," who has a killer crush on Julie (get in line, there, buddy), Helen's jealous older sister (Bridgette Wilson, who isn't convincing because she's actually prettier than her sister) and the dead guy's sister (Ellen's better half, Anne Heche, who is even more butch and white trash than usual here). None of this is the least bit well constructed and is resolved in an even more disappointing fashion.
There's not a whole lot to like in I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, but I tried my hardest. Aside from some very nice Hewitt wardrobing (I never wanted so much to be a shirt two sizes too small) and a few clever kill scenes, this movie has none of the original dialogue, charm or humor of SCREAM. And very little suspense. Its clone characters, lame murder mystery and constantly-pulsing "hip" soundtrack make this the very kind of movie SCREAM so mercilessly satired. And the door is left wide open for a sequel. I know what they're doing _next_ summer...
--
Visit the Andrew Hicks: Movie Critic at LARGE website at http://www.missouri.edu/~c667778/movies.html
Serving America For Nearly 1/25th of a Century!
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews