Has it really been 27 years since that summer when everyone knew what we did?
Type O Negative’s gloomy cover of Seals & Crofts’ “Summer Breeze” playing over the opening credits should have tipped me off.
There’s angst in the air, probably from Y2K, just over the horizon.
We’ve got major marquee value here. I Know What You Did Last Summer has a formerly fresh cast to die for, led by Sarah Michelle Gellar as Helen Shivers, a small-town beauty queen being chased by a vengeful fisherman decked out in foul weather gear.
Along for the ride is her angry douche boyfriend, Barry Cox (Ryan Phillippe), the group’s moral compass, Julie James (Jennifer Love-Hewitt), and Julie’s working-class beau, Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze, Jr).
Best-looking cast ever assembled? No dogs in that bunch.
On a fateful Fourth of July evening, the four most attractive graduating teens in a North Carolina fishing community accidentally run over a pedestrian on their way home from a make-out sesh at the beach.
The formerly close-knit quartet quickly comes apart at the seams. They decide to ditch the stiff in the Atlantic Ocean, and seal their secret by vowing never to speak of this unfortunate incident again.
We skip ahead one year to find out that our pretty protagonists are suffering the effects of collective guilt as their lofty ambitions have fizzled out.
Instead of heading off to New York to become a star, Helen is stuck in town working at her family’s bridal shop. You know, in the fishing village.
Julie, the brain, is bombing out of college, and rich kid Barry is holed up at his parents’ house drinking and brooding. Ray is on a boat.
Then Julie gets a note with the title of the movie in it, and the band gets back together!
The script by Kevin Williamson (Scream) is played with a straight face, so anyone expecting witty insights into horror movie tropes, are simply left with a bunch of tropes to sort through.
The plot proffers suspects aplenty, red herrings, and a few surprises, but it’s all pretty standard cat-and-mouse revenge stuff that unfolds at a leisurely pace.
The kills, courtesy of a maniac mariner armed with a gaff hook, are nothing special, and the eventual unmasking contains zero drama.
Tack on a WTF ending and cue the music.
Most of the “entertainment” value derived from IKWYDLS comes from screen time spent with the spirited ensemble, but Gellar, Phillippe, and company aren’t given much to work with.
The principal characters are rough sketches from better movies, and our comely cast is mostly reduced to fleeing and fretting.
There’s something fundamentally wrong with seeing TV’s Buffy Summers afraid of some swab in a raincoat, and eventually being snuffed out in cursory fashion.
I get it, this is a different character, but even so…
Apparently there were sequels and a remake. I can’t imagine why.
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