I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

[runningscared]

Movie: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), directed by Jim Gillespie

Watched on: Showtime

Ran: 7.58 miles, 8’36”/mile, 01:05:17 (recovery run)

 

This past weekend I was interviewed about a project I worked on wayyyyyy back in 1997, so I was in a bit of a nostalgic mood for tonight’s recovery run. Accordingly, I cued up that bygone year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, set the treadmill to a slow lope, and pressed play… and immediately proceeded to LOSE MY EVERLOVIN’ MIND, because somehow I had completely repressed the knowledge that this movie kicks off with a crappy nu-metal cover of “Summer Breeze.” Seriously. If I didn’t already know this movie ain’t half bad, I’d have to buckle myself in for a ’90s-Style Sucktacular.

 

No, honestly, it’s really not bad! I mean yeah, it’s almost painfully ’90s, with the requisite soundtrack of ironic cover songs and a cast of the A-list heartthrobs that dominated the teen-flick renaissance of the era. And granted, the ill-fitting undergarments and interestingly-chosen camera angles lead me to think of it as I Know What Your Cleavage Did Last Summer, while the script by Kevin Williamson is pretty much just a feature-length horror episode of Dawson’s Eek. But let’s be honest, here: an awful lot of horror succeeds in spite of (or sometimes because of) being stuffed to the gullet with camp and/or cringe. So let’s dive in, shall we?

 

For the uninitiated, IKWYDLS is about four impossibly attractive “teens” (seriously, one of them is a literal beauty queen who bears an uncanny resemblance to Sarah Michelle Gellar, go figure) who get drunk while celebrating their charmed lives. But then, WHOOPSY-DAISY, they run over some guy and decide the only way to keep from destroying their impossibly bright futures with a manslaughter charge is to dump the body in the ocean and tell no one. Fast-forward to one year later, they’re all back in town for the summer, their impossibly bright futures have all been derailed by guilt, and now on top of that they’re receiving little anonymous love notes implying that the writer is, shall we say, aware of activities in which they partook during the warmer months of the prior year. The icing on the cake is that now they’re also being stalked, harassed, and eventually targeted for murder by a revenge-crazed Gorton’s Fisherman.

 

So much for the setup. The way it plays out is pretty familiar territory for anyone who saw Scream or any of the zillion Hollywood teen horror flicks that its box-office success inspired: IKWYDLS is basically a Scooby Doo mystery (starring not one, but TWO future Mystery Machine occupants) with some scares and some occasionally grisly deaths. Main character (and main cleavage) Julie leads her friends on a chase to discover more about the man they killed, in hopes that they can discover who might be coming after them. Where it differs a bit from the standard teen slasher is that the killer isn’t killing THEM off—at least, not right away. He’s mostly hitting them with cars and putting them in the hospital, or hiding in their bedrooms and cutting off some of their hair while they sleep. Sure, he kills an acquaintance or two just to show he means business, but you really don’t start to see the conspirators adding to the body count until maybe two-thirds in. It’s mostly an exercise in paranoia and turning friends against one another, and it works pretty well.

 

That’s not to say it’s even remotely perfect: the cast is strong, and Williamson is generally no slouch as a writer, but the characters here are written to type (I assume because this is “genre fiction”), so everyone’s got to cleave to a pretty thin stereotype. The plot also relies a lot on the trope of the omnipotent secret killer, what with bodies disappearing without a trace in a matter of seconds, and the bad guy seemingly teleporting at his convenience to suit the jump scare. And the disguise of the killer is both laughably unscary and a major plot crutch. (Really, Kevin Williamson? During a July 4th parade in North Carolina, in the middle of a sunny afternoon with temperatures in the mid-90s, there are gonna be SEVERAL people wearing rain slickers and hats so we don’t know which one is the killer? Really?) Also the cat-and-mouse chases are oddly dull, and the ending is completely ’80s-style horror generic.

 

And yet, I can’t talk myself out of liking IKWYDLS at least a little. Watch it as a nostalgia trip, watch it to see a bunch of teen stars yell at each other about something other than who’s going to be prom queen, watch it for the throwaway Dawson’s Creek references and the one time it gets kinda real about how most impossibly bright futures look a good deal dimmer a year after high school graduation. Don’t worry—the “Summer Breeze” cover is over pretty quickly.