I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997).

I Know What You Did Last Summer was one of the first in the late 90’s scramble to replicate the success of Scream and the style of Kevin Williamson. The formula was pretty simple - a troupe of mostly white, hot twenty year olds posing as high school students dishing out snappy dialog set to music that would sell soundtracks. While the films never hit the excitement or success of Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer certainly came the closest in my opinion, probably because it was also written by Williamson.

Here, JLH sports the, “Me and my grandma just said some magic words and accidentally swapped bodies and I didn’t know what to wear” look.

It stars a fun cast that co-starred in a lot of films during that time period. Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Philippe and Freddie Prinze Jr. play unlikable brats who run over a guy after some late night partying at a 4th of July event. Instead of going to the police and telling them it was an accident, they do what most teenagers would do - they make a pact to keep it to themselves. A year later, someone starts fucking with them, starting with a note that reads, “I know what you did last summer.” Honestly, it’s a great name for a film. The rest of the movie is pretty by the numbers slasher stuff with the four kids being stalked by a man in a slicker with a few random people getting murked for no reason simply because you need more than 4 people dead to entertain teens buying tickets to horror movies. Anne Heche shows up as a backwoods yokel too because it was the late 90’s and people liked Anne Heche.

Anne Heche as Ellen after The Ellen Show was cancelled.

I didn’t remember much about the movie - I saw it in the theater when I was 16 and I’m sure I saw it on VHS, but it had been a while. Recently it was released on 4K and I was able to snag it for around $10, so I figured that was worth the rewatch. The film looks and sounds fantastic, and if you need any reason to upgrade to an OLED, 1997 Jennifer Love Hewitt wearing nothing but a bath towel is a pretty fucking good argument.

Anyway, it’s fun, but it’s nonsensical. The most egregious example of this is how great the killer is at quickly cleaning crime scenes. For example, there’s a scene where Leonard from The Big Bang Theory gets a hook to the jaw but no one seems to notice he hasn’t shown up for work for a week. Later, the killer plants the body in the back of JLH’s Chrysler along with about two hundred crabs. She finds it while driving to Helen’s house - she stops and opens the trunk and freaks out (as one would), so she runs to Helen’s where Barry is as well. The three run back and when she pops the trunk, there’s nothing there. Dry as a bone, clean as a whistle. In what must have been less than 10 minutes, the killer dragged the body out along with a ton of crabs in broad daylight and here I can’t clean up my 7-year-old’s breakfast mess in the same amount of time. Later, he punctures the hell out of a character with his fish hook and when a police officer walks up to investigate, the scene is essentially clear of blood. That’s what I thought at first, but now that I think about it, the police in whatever North Carolina town this takes place in are really stupid, so he may have just been walking through pools of blood. I saw this because the disc has several deleted scenes presented in dog shit quality, one of them taking place after Barry is laid up in the hospital.

Sarah Michelle Gellar, late for her Newsies audition.

Early on in the movie, Barry is at the boxing gym and when he comes out, his jacket is gone and so are his keys. When he goes outside, the car squeals away and then comes back for him and attempts to run him down. He’s successful, slamming Barry through a dock house, but then he leaves him on the ground and dips. In the deleted scene, the doctor is with Barry’s parents and he tells them, “It looks like he tried to kill himself, it looks like he tried to drive his car off the dock.” Yeah, sure thing, cops. At least the actors who played Barry’s parents get to see themselves on screen finally, even if it is in 480p with time codes across the bottom of the screen. Some of the scenes are only a few seconds long and it’s clear why they were deleted. There is a fun little scene where 1997 email is shown and another where Philippe and Gellar have a Cruel Intentions kind of moment, but overall they’re not great. There are also a few interviews and a filmmaker commentary.

I like this film because it feels nostalgic. If you like slasher movies no matter how stupid they are, I’d recommend this. If you didn’t grow up in this time though and didn’t see this as a youngster, it’s kind of hard to recommend.