Review of I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) by Jeffrey C — 02 Oct 2010

The horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer is directed by Jim Gillespie and starts Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillipe, and Freddie Prinze Jr. The film takes place in a modern day small fishing town.

The film starts off with a man on a cliff looking likes he is contemplating suicide and playing with a small sort of pendant. Then it cuts to four teenagers, Julie, Helen, Barry, and Ray (Hewitt, Gellar, Phillipe, and Prinze), having a good time on the beach drinking. Julie and Ray are dating as is Helen and Barry and when they decide to go home Barry drank too much so Ray must drive. There driving like normal teenagers in horror movies do, which is not paying attention, and ooh no they hit a man. They believe the man is dead, but wait the director tries to get two to three scares out of this, he is not. The four decide it is best for them to drop the body in the water near them because they knew they would suffer from consequences because it would look like drunk driving. The guy is not dead yet though. They finally go through some stuff which is stupid and leave him in the water. Then they swear to never speak of this again. End of movie. No I'm just kidding, that would be too good. One year later when Julie comes home from school she gets a note saying that someone knew what she did last summer...ooh scary.

The screenplay for this film was absolutely terrible. It was so formulaic it was disgusting. The whole film was predictable, every second of it. The scares were cheap they were just surprises and the actual parts that are supposed to be scary are boring. Now people will probably say to me well it is just a teen slasher film, what did you expect? Excuse me for expecting something with a little originality. Kevin Williamson, you wrote Scream which was a pretty enjoyable film and your follow up is this piece of garbage? Terrible, truly terrible.

The direction for this film, like the writing, was completely formulaic as well. I felt like I saw this film before and clearly Gillespie does not know how to get out a decent performance from an actor. A lot of times in horror films there are some really cool shots, but not in this one. Along with the writing, extremely poor direction.

Acting, ha. There was no acting in this film. It was just people putting on scared faces reading lines. The whole cast was absolutely terrible. I'm not going to get into detail about their performances because clearly they didn't.

Even the score for this film was formulaic. It was just used for the cheap scares that it could get out of the film and that was it. It was suspenseful yet it seemed like I heard it in every other bad horror film. The only thing in the film though that could possibly get a scare.

Overall I give this film a 2/10, due to the fact that it is awful in every aspect. One of the worst films I've seen in a while, I only watched it because it was expiring on netflix instant queue and I thought it would be decent. If I had to recommend this film I would recommend it to people who like really bad horror films.