It’s kind of insane how many hoops horror movies will jump through to absolve certain characters of guilt. See, teen slasher horror is all about punishing sins — sex, drinking, drugs, rock n roll, etc. In other cases the sin is more specific and far less puritan — revenge for a vigilante murder (A Nightmare On Elm Street), revenge for unspeakable acts committed on a loved one (Last House on the Left). But in the end, there’s usually a motive1 , and, in the latter set of cases, it can be seen as deserved. But how can a movie have its cake and eat it too? Have characters do a heinous thing and then allow for the virtuous, innocent final girl?
1. Lack thereof is what made the first Halloween so unsettling.
It can’t. And that’s just one aspect of why I Know What You Did Last Summer fails. Whereas in Urban Legend all of the characters are assholes because they’re 19 and in college and that’s peak asshole, in IKWYDLS the characters are assholes because THEY STRAIGHT UP MURDER A GUY AND COVER IT UP. If Gorton’s Fisherman gone wrong, Ben Willis, wasn’t such a shitty killer whose motives drift in and out for the sake of a body count 2 you might be tempted to side with him. Instead you hope a meteor will hit the tiny North Carolina fishing town where IKWYDLS takes place.
2. He kills two people who had nothing to do with his near-death experience for no reason. If you're gonna make shitty rules then you have to play by them.
It’s fourth of July and four assholes run over a fisherman. Our cast of dreamy teens is as follows:
Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt): Has more objections to covering up manslaughter than anyone else. Is relatively nicer than anyone else in her crew. Cares more about her relationship than just the sex. Brings a teddy bear to college. Obvious final girl.
Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar): Freshly returned from NYC high school beauty queen turned washed up actress. Way to give up on your dreams in nine months. Is supposed to fill the archetypical horror “vapid blonde sexhaver” role but the sex is only vaguely alluded to because the movie is R in the loosest of senses and marketed to 14-year-olds. So they just drive home the fact she’s sorta shallow and call it a night. Fuck writing relatable characters, get paper.
Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.): Julie’s high school sweetheart. Behind the wheel when they nearly murder a man. A total blank slate of a character.
Barry (Ryan Phillippe): Does a stellar job being hatable. Drunk asshole, possibly abusive, whose antics cause Ray to take his eyes off the road long enough to slam a one ton piece of machinery at 70 miles per hour into a human being. Frosted tips and sweaters.
We get our first “the killer is totally a real human but maybe also Michael Myers” moment when we see the accident that would not only turn this man to paste but also seriously injure Barry who is monkey screaming out the sunroof. But I guess a slasher wouldn’t be as fun if the killer was in a wheelchair3. Victim-slash-killer Ben Willis is just fueled by hate which lets him walk away mostly unscathed. He was also dicking around on a bend of a highway wearing black. Not to victim blame but c’mon son.
3. Wait, yes it would. Somebody write this.
The four argue about what to do with the body. Barry is drunk and it was his car so he doesn’t want to go to the police assuming they’ll assume he was driving. Ray doesn’t want to go to the police because he’s not as rich as the others and thinks they’ll pin it on him (?). Julie wants to call the cops. Helen stands around in her tiara and looks as pretty as 1996 will allow but agrees with Julie. Eventually the ladies relent because step aside the men are talking. After several obvious signs that the dead man is not dead4, the group walk away assuming a job well done and that the current will take the not-corpse out to sea.
4. First he grabs at them on the dock. Then when Barry goes into the water to *sigh* retrieve Helen's tiara, dude straight up opens his eyes.
Cut to one year later. And nothing’s really changed except apparently these four close friends bound by a blood pact have not spoken since that night. Everyone is still terrible but now Julie is receiving eponymous threats in neat block lettering. We’re blessed with more arguing between the group of almost murderers. In fact, until the last 15 minutes of the movie we watch these clowns pace in circles, injecting a moment of suspense or danger here or there. First, Barry is hit by a car. Then, the killer breaks into Helen’s room while she sleeps but doesn’t attempt to kill her until later because he’s seen the script and this ain’t the climax. In fact, everyone except Ray gets a brief moment of peril with Captain Jack.
Maybe the fisherman knows that Ray is a blue collar dock worker just like him and feels for him, understanding that he’s just as much of a victim under the thumb of the privileged who run this town from behind a desk, making life altering decisions while he slaves hahahahaha, naw, the movie just wants us to think that maybe Ray did it because why not.
Julie thinks that the person they killed who was obviously not dead was some other local kid whose actually dead corpse washed up a few days later. Julie’s detective-ing leads her to Anne Heche and in a series of convoluted who gives a shits, it turns out that Ben Willis was out on Dead Man’s Curve that night because he too had committed murder (this of the pre-meditated kind) and was dumping a body. The detective side plot which actually leads nowhere is the entire second act of the movie and is unbelievably boring. More infuriating is that we know the killer isn't dead because we aren't mouth breathing morons. So we're just dragged along while Julie goes on a wild goose chase that pads out the entire middle third of the movie.
This takes up about 40 minutes of run time until Captain Hook stops fucking around and starts serving up filet o’ teen. Barry’s bumped off in a small crowded public place but the not supernatural killer can remove his body in seconds with nary a stray drop of blood. Helen dies after a lengthy chase that ends, and I shit you not, when she is fifteen feet from a crowded street and stops running because, I don’t know, it’s like there’s a few missing frames. She literally just stops and accepts her fate.
Perhaps this is Williamson making a Poe-ian comment on guilt. The hooked man is the proverbial tell-tale heart and Helen can no longer live with the idea that she (maybe) killed someone and offers herself up for hahahahah, naw, fuck this movie.
The Final Girl chase is limited to the killer's boat where she finds the bodies of her friends and Ray gets tossed around but not killed. Old Ben gets cut down in a hilariously slapstick way, falling into the ocean and losing his dominant hand. We’re treated to a denouement that’s probably a dream and, mercifully, credits.
I Know What You Did Last Summer is barely a teen slasher and for most of its run-time doesn’t want to be. Slashers don’t have the leads stumbling ass backwards through clues to their killers’ identity. It seems like there was a deadline that had to be met, especially following the success of Scream, and Williamson ran out of ideas, knocking off half the cast in the last ten minutes. The theory becomes more plausible when you learn that Max (Johnny Galicki) wasn't even supposed to die and his death scene was added in re-shoots. The final product is wildly uneven due to cut and paste pacing. I guess it’s well enough acted. After all, nearly everyone in the cast went on to do other things and most continue to, but the fact that they do little but yell at each other and scream doesn’t leave much breathing room.
The worst sins a movie can commit are being completely forgettable and being boring. This is both. The only explanation for anyone remembering it with any kind of fondness has to be nostalgia and being young enough to not know any better. The modus operandi of these movies was to shove as many recognizable TV faces onto celluloid and hope to sell tickets. IKWYDLS serves as the most prominent example of why so many of the Scream derivatives would fail. Throw as much shit at the wall as you want, pad it with stars and pepper in some winks at the audience; but in the end it's still shit.
Voorhees Scale of Inhuman Feats Performed By a Human Killer: 6/10
-Invulnerability: Surviving a brutal car crash.
-Teleportation: Several instances including carrying off Barry’s body in a public place over the course of mere seconds, hiding a body covered with crabs in a trunk and removing it squeaky clean, bouncing around like fucking Nightcrawler during Helen’s chase scene.
-Precognition: Knowing the exact route Helen will take home when accompanied by a police officer to set up a detour.
Lines that made me say "Fuck You Movie" out loud to my computer screen:
-"Let's go down do Dawson's Beach."
Next time: "Did you hear the one about the blogger who gouged his eyes out during a 90s slasher? No, really, it totally happened to this kid who lived in my town."
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