I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
Dir. Jim Gillespie
Written by Kevin Williamson
Starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze Jr.
As you have probably noticed over the years, I have an extreme, perhaps even pathological, love for the genre cinema of the 1980s. Just throw on any random trash from that decade, and I’m a happy camper nine times out of ten. Of course, it’s not as though cinema suddenly achieved perfection on January 1, 1980 and immediately imploded at midnight on December 31, 1989. But the peculiar aesthetic and tonal elements which gradually worked their way through pop culture during the 80’s have a very distinct appeal which could never be mistaken for anything else nor convincingly recreated (despite a whole cottage industry at the moment attempting to do exactly that). They arose out of a particularly ridiculous time in US culture, when a light cocaine haze in the air made everyone unwarrantedly confident and peppy, resulting in a colorful, cartoonish bloom of outrageous stylistic elements completely unfettered by taste, focus, or self-awareness. Scientists had not yet refined irony for wide-scale public use, and so this impulse was allowed to metastasize and mutate into its purest aesthetic form, gloriously free from restraint and utterly unaware of the fact that it would look utterly absurd almost the instant it had ceased to be ubiquitous.
And then, in the blink of an eye, it was over. The inevitable hangover of a decade-long neon-tinted coke binge was upon us. Everyone switched to heroine, got self-conscious, re-discovered human emotion, and promptly plunged into a downward spiral of drab, angsty, navel-gazing. Fashion went from the garish exuberance of the previous decade to a banal eyesore of beige and plaid (and a lot of it; in its sole nod to outrageous excess, the preferred casualwear of an average-sized 90’s man contained sufficient fabric yards to comfortably clothe the entire defensive line of a mid-tier pro football team) seemingly overnight. Music quickly devolved from catchy airheaded pop pablum and cock-rock hair metal to morose, dim-witted Nü-metal and weepy singer-songwriters. Cinema was rocked by a series of hip, irreverent indies, and subsequently ravaged by a tidal wave of unworthy imitators desperate to prove that they could be hip and irreverent too. In short, the naïve, idiotic earnestness of the 80’s pivoted to a different sort of earnestness which was probably no less naïve and idiotic, but was certainly a great deal more pretentious and certain of its own persecuted, tormented genius. America turned into an angsty, self-absorbed teenager, and started to produce and reward exactly the art that an angsty, self-absorbed teenager would make.
Anyway, the movie in question today is not necessarily worthy of 2,000 words of preamble, but there’s just no way to understand it without understanding the context it came from. Like Dirk Gently, I believe you cannot review a movie without first reviewing the society that produced it. I bring all this up just to try and explain what an overwhelmingly 90’s movie I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER –in theory, the subject of our little lecture today—feels like. Few movies are as intrinsically linked to a stark cultural turning point. To whit: after flailing about for nearly the first half of the decade with some genuinely daring and innovative artists, and then suffering the agony of watching a second wave of “why not me?” hipster imitators crash and burn and waste tons of corporate money handed over by confused executives who had absolutely no idea what the kids wanted, by 1997, the culture was well and truly back in control of the big money men, and they wanted things which were as blandly marketable as possible. The mainstream was back, in a big way, and it had subsumed and pre-digested the few flickering bright spots of genuine artistic daring which had defined the early 90s, and was now ready to re-sell them to the kids of America in a form that could be easily monetized and then disposed of.
I mean, how else to describe the soundtrack here, with its numerous agonizing covers of classic rock songs by self-consciously heavy flash-in-the-pan late 90’s hucksters? The movie opens with some jokers named Kula Shakers’ apocalyptically ridiculous cover of Deep Purple’s “Hush,”* and the soundtrack goes on to offer “Gothic metal band” Type O Negative’s cover of Seals and Crofts’ “Summer Breeze,” L7’s cover of Blue Oyster Cult’s “This Ain’t The Summer of Love,” –an admittedly funny choice for this movie—and Toad the Wet Sprocket’s cover of the obscure Beatles’ B-side “Hey Bulldog.” I was almost convinced while watching the movie that it was all covers, but no, there are original tracks from Soul Asylum, The Offspring, Our Lady Peace, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and, yes, an original, soundtrack-exclusive track from KoЯn (which meant that it could, and obviously should have been, nominated for and won “Best Original Song” at the Academy Awards that year. Instead the Oscar went to some long-forgotten ditty called “My Heart Will Go On.” Fun fact: if they had been nominated, KoЯn would have been performing on the same stage as Elliott Smith (whose “Miss Misery” was nominated after appearing in GOOD WILL HUNTING) and LeAnn Rimes (who had, and I shit you not, an original song for CON AIR, written by unstoppable hit machine Dianne Warren). Like I said, it was a damn weird time. A bad time, I think it’s fair to say. Music was circling the drain, obviously, as the corporate stranglehold escalated their recapture of territory briefly occupied by indies, and genre film wasn’t doing much better. Horror, in particular, spent much of the 90s entering a decades-long tail-spin of wannabe-edgy high-concept listlessness so gratingly intolerable that audiences were ready to accept found-footage just two decades later without any fuss.
And if one man could be blamed for the downfall of the horror genre, it would have to be Andrew Kevin Walker, or Kevin Williamson, I was never really sure which was which and it’s obviously way too late for that to be worth learning at this point. Whichever one of them wrote SCREAM, anyway. I have a certain affection for SCREAM, just like I have a certain affection for Nirvana, while still being completely aware that they ruined their respective artforms and inspired a generation of dire imitators that poisoned the culture forever and probably gave us Donald Trump. To be fair, by the time SCREAM came along in 1996 to deliver the coup de grâce, horror had been in something of a downward spiral anyway, the result of many factors, but perhaps most troublesomely the dying exploitation film circuit and a particularly puritanical MPAA which had mercilessly cracked down on violent content. Still, the genre soldiered on, and even produced a few genuine high points (JACOB’S LADDER in 1990, THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS in 1991, CANDYMAN in 1992) until whichever one of those guys wrote SCREAM came along, like the wiener kid at the party who has to point out the joke, to suddenly make horror self-conscious about itself.
Now, the standard party line is that SCREAM changed everything by pointing out how predictable and absurd horror had become, forcing a stale scene to remake itself. And maybe it did change everything for the normies, who hadn’t watched a horror movie since THE EXORCIST and were vaguely aware that there had been nine FRIDAY THE 13th films since 1980 only because a moral panic about violence in horror movies had pushed a bunch of hyperbolic cultural scolds into the national spotlight. But come on, I don’t think horror fans were exactly shocked to suddenly discover, in 1996, that all those Freddie puns and films with “cheerleader massacre” and “maniac [noun]” in the titles were less than 100% authentic representations of gritty reality. Of course horror was dumb, predictable and juvenile; that’s what made it fun. But the industry took one look at the money SCREAM made, and decided that horror was dead, SCREAM had killed it, and this would from now on be the post-SCREAM world where all that old hokum wouldn’t fly, and they would have to make imaginative, original horror movies that delivered the goods while cleverly confounding expectations and providing new, innovative frights.
Just kidding, of course. They decided that from now on this would be a post-SCREAM world, and that meant there should be more horror movies from the writer of SCREAM and featuring a cast of hip young teen heartthrobs. Hence I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, our subject today, which premiered less than a year after SCREAM hit theaters, on October 17, 1997. SCREAM had been, justly or unjustly, praised for its hip postmodern take on horror movies, but IKWYDLS is not interested in playing that game, outside a few tossed-off lines in the painfully try-hard dialogue of the opening. Instead, it banks on the idea that what people actually liked about SCREAM was its whodunnit mystery plot and hot young cast. Which, judging from IKWYDLS’s $125 million dollar box office –less than SCREAM’s $173 million, but still obscenely profitable for a cheapie slasher picture—maybe they were onto something. ‘Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,’ as the saying goes.**
Predictably, despite its naked ambition to ride on the coattails of SCREAM, I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER was actually a script written several years beforehand, and based on an even older source: the 1973 young-adult suspense novel of the same name, written by Lois Duncan. Duncan seems to have been something of a cultural touchstone for a certain generation (her Washington Post obituary cites S.E. Hinton, Judy Blume, and Robert Cormier as her peers!), writing more than twenty novels and novellas for young adults and children, including quite a few that would eventually find their way to film adaptations (her 1976 novel SUMMER OF FEAR, in fact, was made into a 1978 TV movie starring Linda Blair and directed by none other than Wes Craven!) and receiving a Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association for her contribution to literature for young adults and teens. You will not be entirely shocked to discover that the book has a rather different bent than the movie, focusing more on the obvious premise of a guilty quartet being harassed by a persecutorial note-writer, and foolishly lacking any trace of a mysterious, hook-handed killer. Duncan, alive and well in 1997, was not pleased, but you know how these egghead literary types are, constantly whining about “themes” and whatnot, and not understanding that every story would be improved by the addition of a mysterious, hook-handed killer. Sure, everyone knows that Thomas Jefferson wrote his own version of the Bible, but did you know he did it so he could add a mysterious hook-handed killer? True story.***
Anyway, you add a hook-handed killer, you’re committing to being a slasher. But the studio didn’t want just another Jason knockoff to play to the horror freaks, they wanted a mainstream slasher, and as such, I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER became the scion of the wave dickless corporate horror that would eventually come to define the horror cinema of the decade. Mainstream did not, of course, mean highbrow, it just meant a movie which delivered a different sort of exploitation goods to a different demographic. The studio, obviously, had had it with the bottom-sucking horror genre nerds. They wanted to court the cool kids. The beautiful people. And to do that, they had to hire the beautiful people, actors who could sell slasher movies as something of a lifestyle brand.
Enter Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Ryan Phillippe. It was not the first film for any of them –JLH’s first features were two Jim Wynorski movies[!]—but it definitely seemed like something of a coming-out party for a new generation of teen idols. Between them, they nicely embodied the sexlessly pretty, non-specifically angsty aesthetic which defined the WB teen drama series that were catching fire at about the same time. Dawson’s Creek (created by IKWYDLS screenwriter Kevin Whatever!) --arguably the definitive avatar of this particular culture zeitgeist-- wouldn’t debut until 1998, but it would follow on the heels of successful Fox series of a similar bent, including Beverly Hills 90210, Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, and Party of Five, the latter show rocketing the then-unknown Jennifer Love Hewitt to national stardom and, soon, teen slasher infamy.**** Gellar, for her part, had just struck gold with Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which premiered a few months earlier in March 1997. Prinze Jr had done almost nothing of any note whatsoever (a streak he has kept alive to this very day), but for some reason we all knew who he was already and he was kind of a big deal and I can’t explain why, you just had to be there. If you can explain the 90’s, you didn’t live them. (Director Jim Gillespie [the execrable D-TOX/ EYE SEE YOU] claimed he chose Freddie Prinze Jr. because he felt he had an “everyman” quality, which is just about the most dismal view of humanity I’m capable of imagining, comparable to David Carradine’s “Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race” monologue in KILL BILL 2)
These actors, with the arguable exception of Prinze, who is inexplicably absent for much of the movie, are essentially co-leads, portraying four high school seniors who accidentally hit a man while driving along the winding cliffs by the sea that Southport North Carolina is so known for, and, perhaps with undue haste, decide without a great deal of investigation that he is certainly dead and that his identity is unknowable and the best thing to do is dump him in the ocean, agreeing never to tell anyone (this is, I imagine, the sort of hokum it’s easier to get away with on paper than on-screen; why they are unable to accurately assess his identity, despite seeing his face, or determine whether he is fucking alive or dead, are issues that seem painfully inexplicably when you force actors try to depict it and the camera has to awkwardly cut around his face which they can all see just so there’s a little potential mystery here. But I digress). Exactly one year later –on July 4, in fact, a date just screaming with potential meaning which the movie absolutely refuses to notice—the now-estranged foursome is reunited by a series of mysterious accusatory letters and threatening acts, ranging from straight-up murder to… sinister nocturnal haircuts.***** They must then set about unraveling the mystery of WHO IS THE “I” THAT KNOWS WHAT THEY DID LAST SUMMER?
One interesting choice --probably necessitated by an effort to imitate the stubbornly prosaic SCREAM-- is that despite the many impossible shenanigans the hook-handed fisherman manages to pull off (and he’s really into some labor-intensive gaslighting stuff, like filling JLH’s trunk with crabs and corpses, and then, when she parks and goes to get help, somehow in broad daylight on a city street in about three minutes spiriting away all the evidence so she looks crazy), the movie never even hints that the antagonist might be supernatural in origin, trying to get revenge from beyond the grave. Instead, it’s dead-set on centering the plot around the question of which red herring character is the secret killer, unless it turns out to be just some random guy we never met before. To that end, you’ve got the standard giallo Achilles heel: a bunch of pointless side characters who lard things up trying to act suspicious when we know damn well that the more the movie makes them look suspicious, the less likely it is that they're actually our culprit. Anne Heche (GUS VAN SANT’S ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S PSYCHO ’99) at least really leans into this thankless task, giving a fun, elaborately schticky take on some kind of hot, unstable hillbilly incest witch. Otherwise, you’re left with some less plummy prospects. Is it the kid from Roseanne? The teacher from BILLY MADISON? JLH’s extremely passive-aggressive mom who appears in one scene for no reason? One person it definitely couldn’t be is lovable hunk Freddie Prinze Jr, even though he's billed fourth and yet is suspiciously never around. Even though that’s what happened in SCREAM, pretty much. But they're not above tempting you with the idea. (SPOILER: Don’t get excited, you’re not going to get to hear the star of WING COMMANDER explain that he’s doing this because he saw his mom fuck a sailor when he was a child or whatever, even though that would make perfect sense in this case because the movie is set in a small fishing town).
The final resolution about the killer’s identity turns out to be the least interesting and most convoluted solution, but in a way I do sort of respect the surprisingly old-fashioned giallo fundamentals it takes to get there. I admit I was very much expecting a bunch of tiresome SCREAM-inspired postmodern commentary and wanky cleverness. There is some excruciating try-hard dialogue early on (something we were all very much into back then, when everyone thought they would be the next Tarantino), but after the first fifteen minutes or so every single line is either exposition or misdirection, so you don’t have to bear it too long. The performances are universally dire, despite the surprisingly stacked cast: only Ryan Phillipe [“Seaman Grattam” in CRIMSON TIDE] manages to come out looking OK, and that’s only because he dives into his raging douchebag role with no shame whatsoever. JLH is terrible, but is making a commendable effort at trying to look serious and troubled while wearing, say, enormous overalls, or what appears to be a nun’s habit for a giant, or, alternately, a skin-tight aqua number that seems to be beating a hasty retreat from both above and below. Actually SMG might emerge with the worst performance, if only because you can’t in good faith term the one half-expression that Freddy Prinz is able to muster “acting.” But I mean, it’s a teen slasher movie and they all look hot as fuck doing it, so who cares?
In fact, most of what is objectively bad about it –the ludicrous plot, the wooden acting, the corny dialogue—is no different and maybe better than the average slasher (although if we average all slashers, the mean for all these attributes is already sitting at very near absolute rock bottom, so being "better than average" ought to be a given). For all its pretensions to target a different, hipper demographic, and for all its obvious self-consciousness about getting labeled as another played-out gimmick slasher, it’s a surprisingly faithful iterations of this particular subgenre, all things considered (it’s more giallo than slasher, in that its focus is on the mystery identity of the killer rather than simple colorful mayhem, but that’s a venerable subgenre in itself). Indeed, there is at least one legitimately well-executed extended chase scene where SMG runs amok in an attic full of spooky, low-lit mannequins. And the rest is certainly no dumber or worse-acted than the average giallo. But without the added spice of sex and violence and freakish insane perverted weirdess, I admit that the movie struggles to suggest any real high points.
Director Gillespie claimed he saw the screenplay as “simply a really good story,” (which perhaps tells you something about the level of intellectual sophistication involved here) which didn’t need excess violence, and that, I think, is ultimately the problem: it’s not a good story. (Or at least, it’s not a good screenplay. Never read the book.) It’s just a bedrock-basic slasher whodunit scenario. And there’s nothing wrong with that! In fact, it’s a plus as far as I’m concerned. But when you think a simple mystery killer setup is interesting in itself, you miss the whole point. I am compelled again to refer to Vern’s “Blues Theory Of Slashers” which holds that: "slasher movies are a classic American artform not equal to but similar to the blues. There are simple, familiar tunes that you follow, and you put your own spin on it, but you don’t have to get too fancy, you still want it to be recognizable." I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER gets the simple, familiar tune part right, but it’s perhaps not familiar enough with the genre to know that you then need to put your own spin in there. Or, perhaps, it does know, and thinks that simply playing a slick, corporate, highly-produced version is spin enough.
I guess it was, for the moment, since the movie made a ton of money. But the sequel a year later barely made half of what the original did, and I doubt a lot of the popular kids the movie was targeting went on to become life-long horror fans. And why would they? There’s just nothing substantial here to fall in love with, not even on a silly, ironic level. Whereas the horror cinema of the 80’s was so specific and bright and silly that it remains distinct and charming today, by 1997 the cool thing to do was make things professional, bland, and dour. And that’s what I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER ends up feeling like: a competent, responsible professional’s idea of a slasher movie that popular kids would like, based on extensive marketing research from the PR department. It’s not a total embarrassment, and its occasionally dorky enough or dated enough to have a little retrospective bit of personality, but it’s just so… bland. Becoming self-aware did not make art better, it just made it less adventurous. That’s the 90’s for ya. But at least we got a new KoЯn song out of it.
This review is dedicated to the summer we didn’t have: 2020.
* Which turns out to actually be a cover itself, having first been recorded by an artist named Billy Joe Royal, in 1967. But I won’t pretend I knew that.
**By the way, that axiom, usually attributed to H.L. Mencken, is actually a paraphrase of a column by Mencken which ran in as “Notes on Journalism” (he was specifically discussing the appeal of so-called “tabloid” newspapers) in a September 19, 1926 edition of The Chicago Daily Tribune. The full quote is:
“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly. They dislike ideas, for ideas make them uncomfortable.”
*** Story may not be true.
**** By the way, is Party Of Five the second-lamest and most generic name for a TV show imaginable, after Friends? If it isn’t, it’s sure in the running.
***** I’m not making that up, by the way; the hook-handed killer hides out in SMG’s
bedroom and cuts her hair while she sleeps, which seems like a confusingly mild revenge considering that he outright murders like four people who had nothing to do with the accident and just happened to be around. Particularly since SMG participates in a parade later that very day and her hair seems to be fine, so obviously not much harm was done.******
****** Also, about that parade: we’re told it starts at 10 AM sharp, and yet I can’t help but notice it’s still going strong when it’s completely dark out. Those marching bands must be tired! Respect to Hollie Horror for catching this important detail.
CHAINSAWNUKAH 2020 CHECKLIST!
The Man Who Queue Too Much
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TAGLINE |
If you’re going to bury the truth, make sure it stays buried. Good advice. |
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TITLE ACCURACY |
Literally written out during the course of the movie. Another potential title would be I KNOW WHO KILLED ME. |
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LITERARY ADAPTATION? |
Yes, of Lois Duncan’s 1973 novel. |
|
SEQUEL? |
Yes, I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, from 1998. |
|
REMAKE? |
No |
|
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN |
USA |
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HORROR SUB-GENRE |
Slasher, Whodunit |
|
SLUMMING A-LISTER? |
None, although Ryan Phillippe at least would go on to be A-list, this was very early in the career of everyone involved. And Anne Heche. |
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BELOVED HORROR ICON? |
None |
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NUDITY? |
None. |
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SEXUAL ASSAULT? |
None. |
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WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK! |
No animals |
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GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING? |
No, and not even the suggestion thereof |
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POSSESSION? |
No |
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CREEPY DOLLS? |
A room full of spooky mannequins. |
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EVIL CULT? |
None |
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MADNESS? |
None |
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TRANSMOGRIFICATION? |
None |
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VOYEURISM? |
Although we never get the killer’s eye view, he’s definitely stalking them and watching them. |
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MORAL OF THE STORY |
I don’t think I’m gonna be able to do better than the tagline here. |
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