Welcome back to Fright Flashback, where every week until the end of summer we will visit an older horror film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to an upcoming new release. This week we are anticipating Paper Towns, this summer's hipsterbait John Green adaptation In celebration, we'll be revisiting I Know What You Did Last Summer, the 1997 Kevin Williamson slasher based on the 1973 suspense novel by Lois Duncan.
Year: 1997
Director: Jim Gillespie
Cast: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze, Jr.
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
You and I have spent so much time poring over slasher dreck
from the 80’s, it’s easy to forget that there’s actually been a great deal of
cinema history between 1989 and now. I know, right? So between the recent
reignition of my Scream marathon and this Fright Flashback entry, I’d like to
give you a quick crash course on what it meant to be a horror flick in the late
90’s.
Once 1989 hit and the slasher market crashed for god, horror
was in a tough place. Direct-to-video dreck like the Leprechaun sequels were
still sticking to the bottom of the genre’s shoe, but true classics like
Candyman were few and far between. Then Scream went and changed everything in
1996. All of a sudden, horror was marketable again. All you needed was a cadre
of teen stars in tight tops, a handful of self-knowing jokes, and – if he was
available, and he was – Kevin Williamson. The floodgates opened, sending films
like Scream 2, Halloween H20, Urban Legend, and The Faculty spinning out into
the market.
At the forefront of this trend was a little film called I
Know What You Did Last Summer, based on a slasher script that was penned by
Williamson before Scream but snapped up like a prize piece of sushi following
that film’s success.
And buoyed to box office dynamite by Jennifer Love Hewitt’s
ample cleavage.
IKWYDLS tells the tale of a group of graduating seniors in
Southport, North Carolina. Barry Cox (Ryan Phillippe) is a privileged dick, as
either of those names might have proven to you; Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle
Gellar) is his beauty queen girlfriend with dreams of stardom; Julie James
(Jennifer Love Hewitt) is her best friend, a down-to-earth (Final Girl), straight-laced
Final Girl), straight-A student (Final Girl); and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze,
Jr.), is her boyfriend, who is less privileged than the rest of them, which means
that his perfectly bleached tank tops are an inch looser than Barry’s.
Life is hard below the MTV poverty line.
The friends spent the night partying at the beach after the
annual Fourth of July celebration and during the drunken ride home they
accidentally hit someone. After some frantic arguing – Julie wants to call 911
because Final Girl – they decide to dump the body into the ocean and take this
secret to their graves. It turns out that that won’t be too difficult, because
the very next summer a psycho in a rain slicker brandishing a hook begins
threatening them with notes that read “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and bumping
them off one by one. During the year, Julie and her friends have become
estranged, but now they must work together to solve the mystery and discover
the identity of the murderer… before it’s too late.
Spoiler alert! It’s stupid.
If we’re speaking to the film’s raison detre: namely,
delivering prepackaged babes straining at the seams of their crop tops before
safely kicking the bucket so that blood drips pretty from their pouty Dawson’s
Creek 3-episode-arc lips, IKWYDLS is a sterling success. As a bona fide slasher
whodunit flick, however, it does have its flaws. Against all odds.
Having been written before Scream, the film largely lacks
the arch-ironic spin that characterized most of the slashers of this period.
That isn’t necessarily a liability, but it does leave it ill-equipped to
process the layers of urban legend that penetrate the central story or engage
with it at any level other than face value. Not to be outdone, that exact goal
would be fulfilled by the Jared Leto slasher Urban Legend the very next year,
but IKWDLS wastes too much potential on an underexplored premise that leaves it
stuck with a killer who looks alarmingly like the Gorton’s fisherman.
I know what you breaded last summer.
On top of its generally thinner screenplay, the core mystery
is insipid gruel, hopelessly extending the run time with its watery
trivialities. When the film takes a break from terrorizing its teens to let
Julie put on her Nancy Drew knickers and galumph around sleuthing in backwater
townships, the pacing grinds to a screeching halt. Although these scenes
introduce us to Anne Heche, who delivers the most nuanced, dependable
performance of the lot, the plot they serve is an uninterested, nonsensical
slog. And I do realize it’s difficult to provide decent motivations for the
sorts of body counts we’re used to looking at in slasher flicks, but SPOILERS
[isn’t it more satisfying to get revenge for your murder if you’re actually
been… you know, murdered? It seems a bit beside the point if you’ve actually
been alive the whole time. Water under the bridge and all that.]
And of course, existing as it does smack dab in the middle
of the Teen Soap slasher trend, the actual horror in this horror film is
remarkably tame. The stalk sequences aren’t particularly well thought-out (run
perpendicular to the car chasing you, Ryan Phillippe! Did that shower you just
took fog your brain up as well?), the killer obviously attended the Jason TakesManhattan School of Teleportation, and there’s nothing particularly gory worth
mentioning beyond the first kill. There are a handful of surprisingly nifty
jump scares, but mostly the film is content to be blandly functional.
It’s so hard to stay friends after high school.
But it ain’t all bad. Though admittedly not all of this may
be on purpose, IKWYDLS can still be a pretty fun teen romp when it wants to be.
90’s garbage punk blares on the soundtrack, Jennifer Love Hewitt’s breasts
enormous breasts threaten to swallow every gaudy necklace she wears, Ryan Phillippe’s
shirts get bigger with every passing scene like he’s the Incredible Shrinking
Man, and Kevin Williamson’s arch dialogue reminds you of just how smart you and
your friends thought you were in high school.
And, hey. It’s trying. There’s only one truly memorable shot
(the killer viewed upside down from a victim’s perspective) amid the
generically slick cinematography, but somebody obviously fought to include it.
And the idea of Freddie Prinze, Jr. in abject poverty might be laughable but
the idea of class disparity isn’t just a throwaway line. It’s about as sincere
as an Oscar acceptance speech begging for world peace, but at least it’s trying
to open a dialogue. In a slasher movie! You gotta have a little respect for the
sheer mad audacity.
Of the core teen cast, only Sarah Michelle Gellar turns in a
performance worth truly commending (Love Hewitt seems to be attempting to blink
her lines in Morse code and I’m fairly certainly Prinze, Jr. forgot to take out
his retainer before shooting), forming some genuine chemistry with her
castmates, but they all make for a believable bunch when it comes down to brass
tacks. At least they all seem to appropriate age within a reliable margin of
error, which is more than I can say for even the best of the 80’s slashers.
At the end of the day, I won’t be popping this flick into my
DVD player every time summer rolls around. It’s not eminently rewatchable, like
even the worst of its Scream brethren. But every now and again, it’s a decent
frothy 90’s delicacy, as long as you can survive the fiddly mystery bits. Watch
it at a party so you won’t feel embarrassed taking over it.
Body Count: 5
TL;DR: I Know What You Did Last Summer is empty-headed, but benign.
- Max is hooked in the chin.
- Barry is slashed to death with a hook.
- Policeman is hooked in the gut.
- Elsa has her throat slashed with a hook.
- Helen is slashed to death with a hook.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1378
Reviews In This Series
I Know What You Did Last Summer (Gillespie, 1997)
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (Cannon, 1998)
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