I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
Review by Siko Mike
The 90s was a great decade that re-started the slasher genre beginning with Scream. After the success of Scream, screenwriter Kevin Williamson went on to write his other teen slasher film, I Know What You Did Last Summer.
The film takes place in a small fishing town in North Carolina where a group of four friends are celebrating July 4th. Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Ray (Freddy Prince, Jr.), Barry (Ryan Phillippe) and Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) head for the beach after Helen wins first place in a beauty pageant. Everything is going great until on the way home. They are taking a winding road and accidentally hit a man crossing the street due to Barry dropping his bottle of alcohol and Ray taking his eyes off of the road. The man’s face is covered in blood so there is no way of identifying the guy. They can’t go to the police because Barry is drunk and there is liquor all over the car. So they decide to dump the body into the ocean hoping that all of the evidence will be washed away. That night they make a promise never to tell a soul of what they did. One year later, Julie receives an anonymous letter in the mail stating that someone knows what they did last summer. At first they think that it is all a sick joke, but then someone starts stalking them by running Barry over with his own car, cutting off most of Helen’s hair, placing a dead body covered with crabs in Julie’s trunk, and sending Ray a threatening note. As time begins to run out, they begin to get killed off one by one by a mysterious man wearing a fisherman’s outfit and gripping a long sharp hook.
Not a lot of people know this but I Know What You Did Last Summer isn’t quite an original story because this film is loosely based on Lois Duncan’s teen thriller novel, which was published back in the 70s. I did see this film once it came out at Blockbuster to rent way before I even read the novel. I just read the novel last year and it is similarly themed with the same group of teens but very different from Kevin Williamson’s version. In Lois Duncan’s novel, the kids don’t live in a fishing town. They hit a young boy on a bicycle who was crossing the road. One year later, they begin to receive threatening messages such as newspaper clippings of the accident and Barry gets shot in a parking lot putting him in the hospital while the three others try to find out who knows what they did. Is the film better than the original novel? I wouldn’t say that much because the novel relied totally on suspense even though it was so obvious who was stalking them. The thing I loved about the film version was that the stalker’s identity wasn’t revealed until the end.
This movie scared the living hell out of me when I first saw it but then again I was only 10 years old at the time. The acting is very believable even though some of it may come off as cheesy at some points. I think the characters that stood out the most were Julie and Ray because they are likable and I cared to see them live. Ryan Phillippe did an excellent performance as hot-headed Barry Cox who is the major asshole of the film. Then we have Sarah Michelle Gellar who did an alright performance as Helen Shivers but I still prefer her as Buffy Summers any day.
Williamson stayed very close to Duncan’s novel but made it his own. His version is dark, scary, and all out fun. The special FX was done great such as a guy getting a hook right under his chin then dragged across a hot stove, a guy getting hooked in the stomach then blood pouring out of his mouth, and a girl getting hooked in the side and dragged on the hook like a fish. There wasn’t a whole splatter of blood but just enough to satisfy the death scenes. I loved the fisherman outfit for the killer, which was extremely creepy looking.
I Know What You Did Last Summer is a pretty entertaining and creepy slasher flick of the late 90s that I thoroughly recommend.
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