I Know What You Did Last Summer

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s follow-up to Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer ultimately comes off as a prototypical teen slasher that unapologetically emphasizes many of the conventions and clichés lampooned within his 1996 debut. The movie follows four friends (Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Julie, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Helen, Ryan Phillippe’s Barry, and Freddie Prinze Jr’s Ray) as they accidentally strike (and kill) a stranger during a post-party joyride, with the quartet’s decision to hide the body coming back to haunt to them one year later – as they’re methodically stalked by a slicker-wearing psycho with a penchant for offing his victims with an ice hook. Despite its myriad of exceedingly generic qualities, I Know What You Did Last Summer generally manages to sustain the viewer’s interest for the duration of its well-paced running time – with director Jim Gillespie’s stylish visuals and the uniformly charismatic performances initially compensating for the storyline’s almost pervasively familiar nature. There inevitably reaches a point, however, at which the undeniably repetitive atmosphere, coupled with the inclusion of head-scratchingly tame kill sequences, becomes more than the thinly-plotted structure can bear, and the movie subsequently transforms from a surprisingly watchable thriller into a tedious, distinctly by-the-numbers slasher flick. The final product is a disappointingly uneven effort that may be a cut above its teen-friendly brethren – the clever references to Halloween and Psycho are alone evidence of this – yet it’s impossible not to have expected something more than just a passable time-waster given the caliber of Williamson’s first screenplay.

** out of ****