I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER Would've worked better about 20 years ago

Dreams are funny; on a literal level, they never seem to be attached to anything that concerns me when I'm awake.  I've seen this movie before, and didn't find it anything special; why would this movie, almost three years after I last saw it, inspire such a powerful one in me?

So last week, I had my first real, honest-to-God nightmare.  I've had before what others MIGHT call nightmares, but never found them frightening; I found them scary only in an escapist, exhilarating way.  But this one, oh, wow.  It took me about ninety minutes after I woke up to get my head together.  It had it all, everything that REALLY scares the crap out of me, all tied up, on a surface level, with Jennifer Love Fucking Hewitt.  (ah, the easy jokes some of you could make here; I shan't deprive you of your pleasure by beating you to it)

Anyways, that's what inspired me to give this movie another look.  And, just like I remembered, it's nothing special; a well-crafted though unexceptional 90's slasher flick (that is, no nudity).  I can't recall what possessed me and my sister to go on opening night in 1997; maybe it was the charms of Hewitt which had yet to wear thin.  Stupid teenagers stinkbombed the place, too.

Hewitt stars as Julie, a recent high school grad in a small east-coast town where "fish or cut bait" isn't a cliché, it's what your guidance counselor tells you when you ask about your career options.  So she's got plans to go to college out of town, as does her friend Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar).  Their respective boyfriends (Freddie Prinze Jr. and Ryan Phillipe) plan to just fish, and be a rich snob, again respectively.  Their compact friendship is nearly scuttled when one drunken night on the road, they run over some unlucky bastard, and they make a pact to cover up the crime and dump the (possibly still living) body in the drink.  A year later, everybody's back in town for the summer, depressed, distant, and what's left of their friendship is tested when somebody starts dropping them hints that they know all about last summer's events; and then some asshole in a rain slicker starts going around killing people with a hook.

This movie starts well enough, with a lengthy 'copter shot over a roiling sea at dusk which gives us a look at the loop of road from which the film's events shall spring, and eventually settling on some forlorn soul perched atop the rocks, all to the tune of Type O Negative's cover of "Summer Breeze".  I would've preferred their cover of "Paranoid", but that's just me.  Then we're introduced to the folk of this town.

Fish must be EVERYTHING to this town, because only if it was everything would the people subject themselves to the indignity of wearing fish hats.  It's also the kind of town where everybody walks around in a rain slicker ALL THE TIME, no matter how hot or humid it is, no matter if it's raining or not.  And out in "the sticks", we meet Missy (Anne Heche), who's the kind of woman who'll bang on your window with shocking loudness and suddenness...because you forgot your cigarettes.  Or rush at you with a knife...because she's been cutting up fish and wants to see you close up.  I find Homer Simpson's exclamation  "HEYBARTDOYOUWANNASEEMYNEWHOCKEYMASKANDCHAINSAW?!?!?!?!?!?" brought irresistibly to mind.

It's easy to see why most of the teen protagonists in this movie wanted out.  Early in the movie we see Helen be crowned the town's beauty queen, after she says she wants to become "a serious actress". (nobody's told her that the people that make a point of putting that "serious" in there are the first people we expect to end up in porn) At least Gellar does well with her role (and between her and Hewitt, I've had enough cleavage to last me a long, long while), which is more than can be said about the rest of the cast.

Phillipe just spazzes through the whole movie, even punching people out with a broken wrist (!).  Prinze appears to be from the Keanu Reeves "take a deep breath and say every line like it was really profound" school of acting (description courtesy of Christine).  At least he isn't the male Meg Ryan in this movie, like he is in every other movie he does.  And while Hewitt is appropriately sad-eyed and pained throughout the film, she's indicative of a lot that doesn't work here.

On one hand, I appreciate the way a thick sadness hangs over this movie.  For a while, it's refreshing to see a group of horror-movie teenagers start to appreciate the fact that actions have consequences, and that everything has a price.  But man, it sure doesn't make for a very fun movie, and when a good chunk of the movie is about some big guy in a strategically face-concealing rain slicker going around killing people with a hook, I'd like to be able to enjoy it.

Even when it's being totally ridiculous (like when the killer manages in about fifteen seconds to clear a corpse, a big pile of live crabs, and all the slimy shit they must leave behind out of a car trunk), it feels saddening and hopeless.  Even howlingly bad lines like Julie's post-breakup "There is no 'U' in 'me'!" fail to produce a chuckle.  More depressing yet is most of the rock soundtrack, which features, for example, Our Lady Peace just as they were starting to suck. (Chantal, Raine is not good enough for you)

Kevin Williamson wrote this script (based on a Lois Duncan novel) before Scream, and it's no wonder no studio picked it up until that movie hit it so big; in the 90's, even longtime slasher series like Halloween and Friday the 13th had to offer up something different (Druids, body-switching).  I Know What You Did Last Summer does not really offer anything different, except maybe the removal of a few longtime slasher-movie standards (the heroine isn't a virgin, the killer doesn't wear a mask, etc).  Oh well, at least Williamson didn't claim, to my knowledge, that he always envisioned THIS as a trilogy.

The whodunnit aspect is resolved with a lame cop-out, much like the original Friday the 13th, except it's worse here; not only does this movie make much more of a big deal out of "investigating" the characters who ultimately don't turn out to be guilty, but it makes for a much weaker theme.  Without giving too much away, I can only say that what could have been a movie about the horrors of guilt and desperation (like a low-rent A Simple Plan) becomes a movie about much simpler motives which are easier to place on other people than ourselves.

It could've been a lot worse, and I have to respect director Jim Gillespie for crafting such an unrelentingly dire attempt at a horror movie in an age when it's almost impossible to hold back from getting jokey.  And it's nowhere near as bad as its sequel.

Watch for hottie Bridgitte Wilson as Helen's bitchy sister; you know she's a bitch 'cuz she's blonde, but she has glasses.  Glasses on a blonde in the movies are like Spock's beard, it's like instant evil.  Too bad she wasn't in my nightmare, it woulda been a dream!

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