I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
WenQing
Written : Kevin Williamson
Directed by : Jim Gillespie
Main Cast : Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillips
Length : 100 min approx
Rating : ***
Official Website: www.reaperscurve.comTHE FISHERMAN COMETH
Well, here's another script by Kevin Williamson (he wrote SCREAM). And I was told by my friends that I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER is based on a novel of the same name with the same storyline, only it was a thriller not a horror flick... for some reason this novel didn't seem to be credited in the opening titles... maybe I wasn't paying attention. But about the film, it was pretty good, as horror flicks go, and almost hit the spot so many times but swerved away at the last moment.
The story's this simple... four friends in Southport graduate from High School, go driving one night and accidentally knock a man over. Afraid that this will destroy their futures, they dump the body in the sea and hope the tide washes him away. A year later, they each start getting sinister threats or are attacked, and these usually spell out : "I know what you did last summer". Then naturally the killer comes after them one by one, they try to find out if the one they knocked down is the killer, some other people get killed along the way, lots of gripping chases, tons of screams and a gruesome murder weapon.
This film gives us a new kind of killer. We've had a psycho in a hockey mask (FRIDAY THE 13TH), two high school jerks in a scream mask (SCREAM), and a bogeyman (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET), but now we get a fisherman. It sounds a little silly, but it's a fisherman dressed up in a long rubber trenchcoat-like jacket with a rain hood that covers his face (so we don't know who he is of course). Sometimes the camera angles give the fisherman a lot of visual power, like focussing only on parts of him, as if the screen can't capture all of him. It's good sometimes, but when we find out who the killer is in the last 10 minutes, and he drops his fisherman's coat and runs about in denim jacket, jeans and hat, he is so pathetically human that he doesn't exude the fear that he did as he stalked the four friends earlier in the film. That's a little disappointing, and it seems to be a signature of Williamson to expose his killer to this humanising perspective. In SCREAM, the killer gets kicked, punched, bashed by beer bottles and tripped countless times, owing to how human and feeble his reign of terror is. In I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, the fisherman is pretty dominant a fear, and creates a little paranoia (which is good, after all Southport is a fishing seaside town and lots of people wear the fisherman's coat)... but it fails to carry through the good stuff it had going.
Then we have the four friends graduating from high school. Williamson gives them almost enough characterisation in their lines to make them thoroughly sympathetic figures (barring the fact that they knocked a guy down, and some lines are trademark horror cliches that somehow find their way into these films all the time). On the night they graduate, they're filled with childish and lofty but really human expectations for the future. When they knock the guy down they're frightened of how their lives will descend into ruin... young fears that are real and quite striking for how unabashedly honest and wilful they are. There's even a wistful nostalgia for the past that Sarah Michelle Gellar's character Helen Shivers (what kind of name is Shivers?) expresses when she speaks to Jennifer Love Hewitt a year after graduation. She says : "What happened to us? We used to be friends.... I miss you." It's nearly edging into being a teen horror flick with a conscience and a humanity. Hewitt's relationship with her boyfriend and Gellar's with hers both fall apart after the incident with the hit and run. They're brought back to together and the awkwardness of their intimacy is almost touching. Hewitt's cold exterior to block out the experience, her desire to be free of it, and her anorexic look all convey the world-weary pain... but she seems to come across as so "Party Of Five" (where she's from, so I am told) that I think Neve Campbell would do exactly the same job here complete with the specific nuances.
But like I said, the movie almost gets there with both the horror of the fisherman (with a nasty hook and really gruesome eye for gutting people... it is pretty gross and is not good for the disgestive system) and the world-weary drifting apart of the four friends. But at each point it swerves away just to provide the shocks and blood and screams. Those are pretty good but somehow pretty incompatible with the character development Williamson has offered us.
So in the end, I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER probably gets you your money's worth for a horror show (though it botches it at the end, with a protracted finale in a fishing boat and a silly conclusion in a shower), it had some good things running that it didn't follow to its logical conclusions... which in my opinion might have rounded out the flick, and given it more suspense and thrill than just screams and gore.
The Flying Inkpot's Rating System
* Wait for the TV2 broadcast.
** A little creaky, but still better than staying at home with Gotcha!
*** Pretty good, bring a friend.
**** Amazing, potent stuff.
***** Perfection. See it twice.
Read other movie reviews at The Flying Inkpot.Other film reviews by other writers can also be obtained from the InkVault through key word searches.
Explore the Flying Inkpot
They're Alive!
Concert Reviews
Bit deadish:
Other Resources at The Flying InkpotHome
