I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
101 min.
Release Date: October 17, 1997
The slasher horror scene took a toll after the late 1980s, until 1996 when the entire genre was refurbished last winter with a knowing little horror film directed by Wes Craven. Compared to all of the "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" knockoffs and sequels, "I Know What You Did Last Summer" is a solidly entertaining, attractively cast R-rated slasher film with more attention paid to genuine tension and efficient characterization of teens we grow to care about rather than just violent kill scenes.
In a North Carolina fishing town, best friends Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), along with their respective boyfriends Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Barry (Ryan Phillippe), celebrate July 4th and their last summer before each of them goes off to different colleges. Plans change when a fisherman is struck by the teens' car along a winding road. Although Julie knows they should turn themselves in, the four friends agree to dump the bystander’s corpse in the ocean and make a pact to never speak of the hit-and-run again. One year later after the friends have all lost communication with each other, an understandably withdrawn Julie returns home from school for the summer, only to be the first to receive a threatening note. After a certain someone in a slicker and wielding a fishing hook is done sending them threats, he (or she) begins stalking and killing Julie and her friends one by one.
Screenwriter Kevin Williamson's follow-up to "Scream" has less to do with the YA book of the same name by Lois Duncan, but as a straight-ahead representative of the slasher subgenre, it more than works. Directed by Jim Gillespie, the film opens with a title sequence, impressively carried out on a technical level as it is scored to Type O Negative's grungy cover of "Summer Breeze," as the camera glides over the ocean, looms over a winding road and then circles back to the edge of a cliff. Though it shouldn't be directly compared, "I Know What You Did Last Summer" was released into a horror landscape when "Scream" already existed and changed the game. Despite a few self-aware touches (Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling and Williamson's own "Dawson's Creek" are both referenced), this horror film is more of a suspenseful good time that plays into the conventions rather than working on a meta level, and that's a feature rather than a bug.
Like "Party of Five" co-star Neve Campbell did in "Scream," Jennifer Love Hewitt makes for an appealingly tough and smart yet vulnerable horror-movie heroine as Julie James, and she's a guttural screamer (some of her shrieking does, however, admittedly get to be a little much during the climax). Sarah Michelle Gellar is equally as good, if not better, as Helen Shivers, whose friendship with Julie has strained since the accident, not to mention her dreams of moving to New York and becoming an actress crashing and burning after that fateful summer. In the roles of the other halves, Ryan Phillippe is convincing and often funny as cocky jerk Barry and Freddie Prinze Jr. ably fills the role of nice guy Ray. Anne Heche leaves a haunting impression as the initially strange yet compassionate Missy, and in barely ten minutes of screen time, the actress twists expectations and brings surprising humanity to a backwoods loner.
Though "I Know What You Did Last Summer" might still remain the director's most successfully mainstream project, Jim Gillespie does know how to expertly craft a suspense sequence when he isn't just setting off false scares (i.e. someone loudly bangs on a car window). Most indelible of all is Helen being stalked in her own home, continued with her breathlessly tense chase scene from a cop car to her family's department store (pay attention to the plastic-covered mannequins). Even as Julie puts pieces of the mystery together quite quickly like a young Jessica Fletcher and red herrings try throwing off the viewer, the reveal is a bit deflating, considering the identity of the fisherman killer does not follow the rules of a classic whodunit. Without factoring in nostalgia when Blockbuster was the hot spot and Kula Shaker's "Hush" was replayed endlessly, "I Know What You Did Last Summer" still deserves its due as the most respectable Independence Day-set slasher pic the genre has ever seen.
Grade: B +
Comments
Post a Comment