...and in every other slasher movie ever made (I Know What You Did Last Summer (DVD))

Member Name: wampyrii

Product:	I Know What You Did Last Summer (DVD)
Date:	21/12/01 (189 review reads)
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I wonder if screenwriter Kevin Williams had this sitting around in his bottom drawer when he started work on Scream. It seems strange that a writer would pen something like Scream which was a merciless parody of all that is ‘wrong’ or at least over-done in the slasher movie sub-genre and then a year later, following Scream’s $100million+ box office success, release a movie called I Know What You Did Last Summer which basically DOES all that he pointed out as being old-hat and cr*p! OK, so its an obvious cash-in having whet the appetite of a new generation of movie goers who hadn’t been slashered to death in the 80s, but you’d think that having the ‘vision’ to see all that is wrong with the genre, he might have gone to ‘some’ lengths to add something new.

Well, you would have thought this, but instead “I Know” is a complete retread of the 80s slasher movie, complete with EVERY cliché from that genre and offering absolutely nothing new in the process. Its set on a national holiday, this time July 4th(as opposed to Halloween, Friday The 13th, Black Christmas, April Fools Day...etc.), and features a bunch of young college kids who find their group getting slowly chopped to bits by a guy who comes in the prerequisite slasher guy uniform. Nope, not a hockey mask, not the grim reaper costume...but a umm fisherman, complete with bright yellow souwester, gumboots and fishing hook! I bet you’re scared already! The reason for all the ensuing mayhem is this. Picture the scene a year previous to the start of the murders. Sarah Michelle Gellar has just been crowned queen of a beauty pageant in a small Carolina town(the Croak Queen actually...pun intended). Along with her boyfriend(Ryan Phillippe), best friend(Jennifer Love Hewitt) and her boyfriend(Freddy Prince Junior) they throw a party on the beach, Phillippe drinking too much as usual before jumping into a car for a drive. Phillippe hits a pedest
rian walking on the road and fearing manslaughter charges they dump the body into the ocean...the still living body that is, before they each go their separate ways, Gellar heading out to follow a showbiz career, Hewitt off to college etc. A year later though they are back, wracked with guilt over what they have done and exactly one year to the day the killings start committed by a figure who becomes dubbed The Fisherman due to his outfit...

What do you say about a movie like this which you haven’t said a million times before? It starts off so well with a camera flying low over a dark brooding ocean and then panning high up into the sky to highlight a shadowy figure on the cliff tops. We are led to perhaps think that we are in for a creepy tale for a change, perhaps one directed with some kind of visual flair at least, but it never delivers anything of the sort. Instead we run through an A-Z of horror clichés which may have kept the teenage audience who had never experienced a slasher movie other than Scream amused(most I know didn’t even realise Scream was a parody of anything) but would do nothing but bore the pants off the rest of us. I Know insults its audience’s intelligence with its dumber than dumb characters who do the stupidest things in order that the director may offer us another cheap scare or two. There’s a psycho on the loose, he dresses like a fisherman, so of course you go wandering around an abandoned boat alone don’tcha? Of course you do, that’s why we as an audience will swallow it, we are that dumb! This kind of thing is tiresome and incredibly lazy on the behalf of the screenwriter and personally I’m bored with it, it makes me want to throw things at the television screen...sometimes I do. I Know What You Did Last Summer would have caused me to run out of things to throw because it does it so damn often.

Forget any thoughts of suspense here either because despite a little in the beginni
ng you soon come to realise that the non-essential characters are all there to die and nothing more. You can tell because their part seems 100% superfluous to the proceedings so you just sit and wait for them to buy the farm, and when they do it ain’t scary because its neither a surprise nor is it handled very well. There are too many cheap shocks here and it get boring very quickly. Directors must also realise that a high body count in a horror movie is all well and good, but it gets less tense and less scary with each ensuing death. I Know What You Did Last Summer becomes rather tedious towards the end as you sit there watching Capt. Birdseye rack up another victim. Its even more difficult to care about these deaths when you really couldn’t give a damn about the characters. They are all so one dimensional that its virtually impossible to care whether they buy the farm or not. There is little attempt to develop their characters, even those of the main four who we are really just told are the rich brat, the brainy one, the totty and erm the other one, without adding anything to this as it progresses. Effectively you watch them go through the motions but you don’t really care whether they end up on the end of a fishing hook or not!

As to acting and casting, well you know that slasher movies are never going to have any form of high calibre acting in them so there’s no point even going there. These lot all ply their trade in television shows and it shows to be fair, they aren’t bad, but they certainly aren’t good either. Their selection is obvious - the two guys were chosen because they rep resent hunky type 1 and hunky type 2 for the ladies and the two girls because they have cleavage and an impressive set of lungs for when the screaming starts. Forget everything else, I wouldn’t be surprised if casting just involved a T&A check and a screaming session...

An interesting subtext runs through the story which i
s never allowed to develop unfortunately. The four friends are drawn back to the town because of their guilt over last summer’s actions and when the murders start you see this guilt and frustration begin to tear the friendships apart. This could have been carried a little further if you ask me which may have added something to the movie but alas, it was not to be. Instead, you have a plod through 80s slasher history and the typical “not-who-you-thought-it-was-ending” which makes following the clues through out the movie pointless because they are designed so that they do not lead to the killer...unfortunately we all know this by now, so it doesn’t fool anyone but rather shows even more lazy film-making. Its not clever to make a movie where the mystery comes from the fact that you are ill informed all the way through - its just damn annoying.

If you have never seen a slasher movie before then this is as good a place as any to start, it covers just about all the bases seen in every other slasher movie so its probably a good introduction. If on the other hand you have seen just one then forget it, because it offers nothing new other than a change of actors, setting and killer’s costume. Watch it perhaps if you have seen Scream and wan t to know exactly what it was parodying, otherwise give it a miss, its boring teen horror which has been done a million times before.


~General Info~

Director: Jim Gillespie
Producers: Stokely Chaffin Erik Feig Neal H. Moritz
Screenwriter: Kevin Williamson from Lois Duncan’s novel
Cast: Jennifer Love Hewitt as Julie James
Sarah Michelle Gellar as Helen Shivers
Ryan Phillippe as Barry Cox
Freddie Prinze Jr. as Ray Bronson
Muse Watson as Fisherman
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Genre: Horror
Released: 1997
Run Time: 1 Hour 40 Minutes


~Official Site~

http://www.spe.sony.com/movies/iknowwh
atyoudid/

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