If a Movie Title is Too Long…
I know why this movie is no longer good.
Do you remember what you did last summer? Did it involve hitting someone with your car while your friends were with you, and then dumping the victim in a harbor and pledging to never tell anyone? Hopefully your previous summer didn’t involve murder, or maybe, hopefully it did. I don’t know your life!
Despite its long AF title and preposterous premise, I Know What You Did Last Summer (IKWYDLS) killed at the box office when it was released in October of ’97. Kind of odd that a film that takes place during the summer would be released in the fall, but whatever, I’m just being a brat. The writer of the movie is Kevin Williamson, who some may know as the writer of Scream (an excellent horror movie) and the hit TV series Dawson’s Creek, amongst other things. Williamson was known for creating dialogue for teenage characters that was witty, smart, and mature in comparison to real teens, which is something that his fans enjoyed.
The plot of the movie starts out simply enough: a group of friends are enjoying their last summer together before heading off to new lives, but they accidentally hit a man with a car. This leads them to make a rash decision to dump his body in the harbor of their small fishing town, agree to never speak of it again, and then scatter in the wind off to life after high school. This is where it gets all muddied: cut to the next summer when they are returning to their small hometown after their first year away. Strange things start to happen, and they realize that someone is coming after them with a vengeance for their crime and is thirsty for their deaths; it gets crazy.
When I saw this movie in the theaters way back in the day, I really enjoyed it! It had a handful of hot and relevant young actors, namely Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Ryan Phillippe and Freddie Prinze Jr. were bonuses because they were both cute. The two female leads were the more well-known of the group. Hewitt was making waves on her show Party of Five, and Gellar was kicking ass as Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As for Phillippe and Prinze Jr., they were in some TV shows and movies at the time, but IKWYDLS really launched them into the teenage dreamboat stratosphere.
I remember thinking at the time that it was an awesome scary movie with plenty of jump scares, high tension moments, and a real “who done it” vibe. The best scene that I can remember thinking had the most tension and action is when Gellar’s character, Helen, is in a darkened store with mannequins covered in plastic tarps. The killer is under one of those tarps, and he jumps out at her. After that, a struggle ensues, but Helen loses the battle. As a teen, this scene was pretty awesome.
Watching the movie as an adult with more scary movie experience, I can see how many flaws and eye-roll moments there are. There’s one scene in particular that stands out. Julie, Hewitt’s character, is driving her car and hears a strange noise in her trunk. She pulls over to investigate, and the entire trunk is filled with live crabs and a dead body. She screams and runs away, bringing back Helen and Barry, played by Phillippe. Of course by the time they return, which was maybe 20 minutes, the body is gone, as are all of the crabs.
Mind you, Julie parked on a street filled with houses. Wouldn’t the neighbors notice a man pulling a dead body from a trunk, as well as at least 50 plus live crabs being hauled away? Not only that, but when Barry pops the trunk, there isn’t a trace of anything, and the trunk is totally pristine and dry. Then, once Julie tries to explain that the killer is messing with them, she stands in the street and spins in a circle screaming, “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR, HUH?! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!” which is too dramatic and would, again, draw attention from the neighbors. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve made my best friend laugh by doing the spin and yelling that line in her driveway.
Now, one would think that since Williamson wrote Scream and that movie still holds up, that IKWYDLS would also hold up, but it falls short. It turns out that the killer was the guy they ran over, but he didn’t die after not only being hit at a high speed by the car, but also getting thrown into deep water. Is he immortal?! I’d just die and call it a day. The plot gets too convoluted once Julie figures out what’s really going on, which is in the last 20 minutes of the movie. Let me see if I can break this down quickly: the killer had killed someone on the night he was almost killed, and then wanted to kill these kids that left him for dead. Talk about a dude with a lot of vendettas!
Williamson really went overboard with this plot, but because the movie was released during a time when teen shows and their stars were being worshiped by young audiences, it did extremely well. But, now that the stars of the movie have grown up and aren’t as prominently placed in Hollywood, it’s easy to see that IKWYDLS is cheesy and not really that scary.
I wonder what teens would say about the movie today if they were to be shown it for the first time? Maybe they would like it, maybe they’d be too preoccupied with their phones to even glance at it, but in my opinion, IKWYDLS is all washed up.
Check out this retrospective, and others, by R.J.F. on FarFromProfessional.com.
