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I Know What You Did Last Summer
Dumb and not scary, not gory... not nothin’.
1997
Director: Jim Gillespie
Starring: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillipe, Freddie Prinze, Jr.
It won't help.
THE SETUP:
A bunch of graduating morons kill a guy [or they don’t, or they do, or they kill his brother, or his girlfriend’s dad, or something] and the next year he comes back to torment and kill them all.
DISCUSSION:
I’m not that thrilled with the generic slasher movie. I didn’t even like Halloween. I just don’t really find it scary or interesting, and it lends itself too much to repetitive scenes and idiotic jump scares. But I found a VHS copy of this for $2, and it has Buffy, so I thought it might provide some marginal amusement. And if not, you know, at least people get killed.
This movie, being a 17th-generation copy of every slasher movie ever made, did not provide much in the way of marginal amusement. Or killings. It’s basically just a big turd.
The story is nonsensical, and gets worse by the second. Jennifer Love Hewett—enough said. Ryan Phillippe’s character is violent to the point that no one in real life would suffer to be around him. Whatever… this movie has so many idiotic, manipulative permutations devised solely to find ways to pad out the story and provide new but idiotic chills that you just get annoyed after a while.
It was strange to see Sarah Michelle Gellar play someone considerably dumber than she is [you can tell from the intelligence she conveys on Buffy], but the interest in that doesn’t last long.
One of the few pleasures of slasher movies is the variety and creativity in the deaths. Unfortunately, in this movie people are only killed with the fish hook, a boring weapon to begin with, and soon it all becomes very one-note. And, you know, if a horror movie is bad, at least you have some gore to spice things up, but fish hook deaths are remarkably gore-free [not to mention how tame the whole thing is anyway], removing even the slightest level of lingering interest in making it to the end. Making things still worse, the killer offs a large number of peripheral characters, making it seem as though he has no real motivation or plan. I pity people who just haven’t seen enough good horror to end up thinking this is a decent movie.
The idiocies really start mounting as the film comes to an end, the biggest when JLH opens her trunk and finds a body covered with fresh, live crabs who apparently don’t mind being out of water for hours in what looks like significant summer heat. She goes inside for about 2 minutes, and when she comes back out, the body and crabs are all gone, and the trunk freshly cleaned—all this having been accomplished in broad daylight in a residential area. It can provide some tepid amusement to imagine the killer stopping by in his black rain slicker, pulling the body out, stuffing the crabs into two Hefty garbage bags, and steam cleaning the inside of the car while no one living nearby notices. That would be the most interesting part of the movie, but please note that this scene is not IN the movie. I hope screenwriter Kevin Williamson made a lot of money off this… he deserves it if audiences really are willing to put up with it. There would be some Scary Movie-ready amusement in JLH’s “what are you waiting for?” freak out immediately following, but by this time there’s nothing that can really help.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
No.
