I Know What You Did Last Summer
HORROR-THON 2021 • THEY’RE HERE
8.5/10
DIRECTOR: Jim Gillespie
STARRING: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., Ryan Phillippe
RELEASED: 1997
RUNTIME: 1 hour, 41 minutes
WATCH ON: YouTubeTV, Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango At Home
SCARE LEVEL: Low to medium
NOSTALGIA LEVEL: Off the charts
Every scene in this movie looks like a 1997 Delia’s catalog that got lost at sea. The cast is Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, and Freddie Prinze Jr. That’s four of the most ‘90s faces possible, stuck in a North Carolina fishing town with a man holding a hook.
On the Fourth of July, four friends drive home from the beach and hit a man on a dark coastal road. They panic. Instead of calling anyone, they dump the body in the water and swear they’ll never talk about it.
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A year later, Julie is home from college and she’s a wreck. Then a note shows up: I know what you did last summer. The others don’t take it seriously. Barry gets run down by his own car. Helen, the town beauty queen, wakes up with her hair chopped off. After that, someone in a fisherman’s slicker starts actually killing people.
The group learns that the man they “killed” had his own dark past. It also turns out he’s much less dead than he hoped.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
The screenplay is by Kevin Williamson, who wrote Scream the year before, and you can feel it. It’s smart about slasher rules, but it’s also a lot more serious than Scream, which makes it a little funnier than it means to be.
Sarah Michelle Gellar gets the best sequence. Helen is running through a closed department store while the killer follows her. She’s the smartest one in the group, and she gets stuck with the worst ending. It’s almost hard not to be mad at it.
And yes, the scene everyone remembers: Julie in the middle of the street, arms thrown out, screaming “What are you waiting for?” at no one. It’s peak melodrama. It’s probably fun to scream, too.
The fisherman in the slicker is pretty unsettling, but it’s a rain jacket. It’s the guilt, the secret, and knowing somebody out there knows it.
Wardrobe notes: spaghetti straps over t-shirts, cropped cardigans, a beauty pageant sash - all of it has come back around. I’d still wear a bunch of this.
FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY
The rocky roads surrounding Dawson’s Beach, where the four characters have their hit and run, and Julie travels frequently, are the same mountainous road location used in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.