Tainted: The Problem with the 90's, Part 2

Tainted (1998) 

Dir. Brian Evans

Written by Sean Farley

Starring Dean Chekvala, Greg James, Sean Farley

 

 

 

 

“Somebody there is having stupid sandwiches, and that’s for damn sure”

           

           

            Ah, and here we discover the other side of the 1990’s. With I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, we had an opportunity to examine the bland, homogenizing corporate iron curtain that descended upon the culture in the second half of the decade. But with TAINTED, we have something quite different: a relic of the multi-media indie boom that shattered the recursive stasis of the remnant 80’s culture and briefly infused the American artistic scene with some energy and unpredictability. There is a side of the 90’s that was Boy Bands and WB teen dramas, but there was another side that was PULP FICTION, FARGO, CLERKS, Twin Peaks, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, the Flaming Lips, Public Enemy, Digable Planets. Legitimately offbeat, adventurous art with a hip, self-aware edge and a plethora of distinct artistic voices so unexpected and compelling that for a few years in the early 90’s they managed to knock the corporate behemoth back on its heels. Movie and record execs never saw it coming, and responded by fumbling around, blindly handing out checks to every new weirdo who showed up with some new project they didn’t understand but seemed hip, disaffected, and dangerous. 

 

            This was for the best, all things considered, and some of the defining art of my life came from this period. But of course, you can’t have the kind of success that these (initially) independent artists enjoyed without everyone else wanting a piece of the pie. Imitators quickly surged into the newly-opened space, beguiled by that most persistent and compelling of questions: If Kevin Smith can do it, why not me?

 

            TAINTED is a pretty definitive answer to that question. You cannot do it, it turns out, because you are not Kevin Smith. Very few people these days would be eager to defend the idea that Smith is a visionary artistic genius or that CHASING AMY has held up well, but on the other hand, he does have something. There’s a voice there, a point-of-view, and, more than anything, a relentless drive to get that point of view out there, so strong, in fact, that Smith has more or less abandoned cinema altogether and become a podcaster, cutting out the middle man and just getting to deliver his monologues directly. In short, he made CLERKS not because he had any expectation that it would make money and cement a comfortable three-decades-long career as a cultural fixture; he made it because he had to, because he was compelled by something inside him that could not be ignored. You can argue about the merits of the art he produced, but you cannot argue about the specificity of his voice, or the compulsion that produced it. Like much of the art of the 90’s, its value was in its distinctness: it was produced wholly and without reservation from the subconscious of a genuine weirdo, and not something you could fake or recreate.

 

            But faking and recreating it was exactly what the next wave of indie wannabes had in mind. They were inspired by Smith and Tarantino and Nirvana and NWA, but they were not compelled the same way the best of the 90’s indie artists were, and so they sought to imitate, rather than produce their own unique vision. They didn’t, by and large, have their own vision, they just recognized something cool and thought it looked easy enough that they could do it too.

 

Hell yeah, NADJA

 

            Hence, TAINTED, which wears its influence so proudly that it’s all but impossible to ignore. In its seven-sentence writeup of TAINTED, VideoHound namechecks CLERKS in the very first sentence. I mention this because it’s the reason I watched the film. Around 20 years ago, I, like the protagonists here and like Randall in CLERKS, was employed at an independent video store, and back then, since you weren’t gonna see IMDB unless you dialed into your desktop PC browser at home, we had a physical media substitute: VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever “The Complete Guide To Movies on Videocassette, DVD, and Laserdisc” (which I’m just now discovering is still an annual print publication to this very day!). Much of my workday back then was spent trawling through this book for new movie suggestions, and here, in their brief write-up of TAINTED, I found something that sounded kind of interesting. “Script has many laughs, lots of attitude, and plenty of pop culture knowledge,” raves the review (which is what we wanted back then), and I thought I’d give it a try. Except that I never found it available anywhere. Our normal supplier didn’t have it. Our arch-enemy Blockbuster Video didn’t have it. Hollywood Video didn’t have it. Nextflix, when it came along as a mail-order-service, didn’t have it, and has never gotten it. So this year, I figured I’d waited long enough, and ordered it from Troma (who distributed, but were not involved in its production). So this review is, in a way, the culmination of a 20-year quest.

 

 

             My confidence in VideoHound’s bullish assessment of the film’s merits –which had left such a strong impression on me all those years ago-- was quickly thrown into question when my buddy noticed that there is an extremely prominent product placement in the one of the first scenes… for none other than VideoHound! Uh-oh. Possibly a little conflict of interest here. Not a great sign. And the assertion that the “script has many laughs” quickly began to seem dubious as well, as the introduction of our arguable protagonist Ryan (Greg James, G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA “Submarine Sailor, uncredited”) finds him awkwardly kicking a one-night-stand out of his apartment (“Willing to bet you never pull any sensitivity muscles, huh?” she fumes) and then turning to the camera to deliver a monologue about easy women so harrowingly wrongheaded and smugly certain that it’s an in-your-face bit of ballsy truth-telling that it might just turn your hair white. A little sample, which is as much as I can bring myself to transcribe:

 

“I didn’t promise her a thing. I stuck my dick in her! Last time I checked, that wasn’t proposing!...There’s no way you can respect, let alone commit, to a woman who will sleep with you on the first date! Am I wrong or what?”

 

It probably doesn’t help that he has the long-on-top-short-in-back-parted-down-the-middle haircut that every dipshit had when I was in middle school, but this Ryan has to be one of the most unwittingly intolerable characters this era produced, and there’s no shortage of competition. This is the kind of thing I need you to warn me about, VideoHound. 

 

#HoundGate #CorruptionInVideoReviews

 

             In short, this monologue (and basically every line that follows it during the unhurried and uneventful 98 minute runtime) sums up the fundamental problem with this era of indie outsiders clambering out of the shadows and into the spotlight: they had all listened to a little too much Bill Hicks. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Bill Hicks too – remember, I grew up in the 90’s, these are my people. But having emerged from the fatuous 80’s –an era so culturally regressive and conservative that people were genuinely scared of Heavy Metal bands that now seem about as dangerous as Benny Goodman—we emerged with a burning, insatiable desire to cut through the stifling niceties and tell it like it is. This was a laudable impulse, and a much-needed course correction after spending a whole decade where the most dangerous thing in music was, like, Phil Collins. The problem, in retrospect, was that when “we” –the legion of disaffected, largely white male artistes and pop-culture nerds who gained ascendency in the 90’s indie boom— got a yin to tell it like it is, we may not have known what it is as much as we assumed. That’s how you can end up with a movie that kicks off with a lecture about clingy one-night stands, as if we’re just going to naturally be on board with that. Or, for that matter, a movie entirely set and filmed in the Detroit area which has exactly zero black people in it, (give or take the prominent placement of a mural which I believe to be Detroit Pistons’ small forward Grant Hill, based on his #33 uniform). Or a gay vampire who delivers his own cringe-worthy monologue about “fence-sitting” bisexuals.

 

            Oh yeah, the movie is about vampires. Probably should have led with that. I mean, it’s really about the late 1990s, of course, but the plot is literally CLERKS meet Anne Rice: intolerable deadwood Ryan and his sarcastic, noticeably Randall-like video-store co-worker J.T. (screenwriter Sean Farley, who apparently had a small role in fellow Michigander Sam Raimi’s ill-fated CRIMEWAVE) hitch a ride to a midnight showing of BLADE RUNNER with their new colleague Alex (Dusan “Dean” Chekvala, who would revisit the vampire game years later with a run in True Blood), only to get dragged into an underworld of unflashy midwestern vampires when Alex reveals he’s a bloodsucker and gets embroiled in a plot by a crazed vampire to contaminate (or, “taint” if you will) the city’s blood supply.

 

            That’s the plot, and it’s largely structured as a kind of vampire procedural, where Alex, with an unwilling Ryan and J.T. in tow, travels around to various secret vampire locations and shakes down the locals for info on the rogue vamp.* But in practice, this is all very transparently a flimsy excuse to set up an endless series of painfully overwritten pop culture diatribes, in which no idea is ever stated in five words that could not be overstated in 50. This is lamentable, but perhaps more understandable in context: people forget this today, but there was a time --and not all that long ago!-- where bickering all day about comic books or sci-fi movies was not looked upon as a socially acceptable activity. It was the province of weird, socially awkward outsiders, and if you were known to engage in this sort of tomfoolery, you were likely to be branded a “nerd,” which back then was an epithet with the power to significantly limit your social options, rather than something gorgeous celebrities call themselves as they do press tours for 250-million-dollar comic book adaptations. 

 

Would you believe there was a time that this guy wasn't considered cool?

 

Back in the 90’s, though, the conventional social order was deep in the throes of a violent upheaval. CLERKS, of course, had blazed the trail, turning unabashedly nerdy conversations which had previously been confined to basements and comic-book shops into something that played on-screen as a little bit edgy and rebellious, which was exactly what the kids were looking for. And when the movie became a minor hit, the culture noticed, and the gatekeepers eagerly ushered the once-maligned nerds (and their wallets, fattened with disposable income by a burgeoning tech industry and no dependents) into the mainstream. By the late 90’s, the nerds, emboldened by Tarantino and Smith’s nonstop pop-culture pontification, hadn’t just gotten their revenge, but were well on their way to overthrowing the popular kids altogether and establishing their brutal hegemony over the culture which persists to this day.

 

            Even by 1998, however, it wasn’t obvious that the tide had turned, and that in just a little under two decades, BLADE RUNNER would have a sequel with a budget of 150 million bucks, while nobody under the age of 30 would know who Jennifer Love Hewitt was. The nerds were still feeling newly liberated from the unwanted margins of society, and ready to flaunt their newfound countercultural chic, by, for example, making a movie where two video store clerks and their vampire pal blather on endlessly about the merits of RAISING ARIZONA and BLADE RUNNER and smugly trash the hoi polloi who fail to adequately appreciate their charms.

 

That trashing is an important thread here, because if part of this newfound feeling of liberation took the form of celebration, it also had a darker side, as newly empowered dorks turned to some sadistic score-settling with old enemies. The most immediate and deeply resented of those enemies were women, who by 1998 were being dealt the opening salvo of a relentless, bone-deep campaign of misogyny perpetrated by the bitter beta-males they had ignored in high school, but who had finally seized some power of their own and were anxious to pay back with interest the indignities they felt they had suffered as unwanted adolescents with no social skills. Consequently, the 90’s was a time of roiling, omnipresent misogyny, barely concealed beneath a cresting wave of smug sarcasm and edgy provocations. And thus it is that we wind up with the situation at hand, which cheerfully introduces us to its protagonist reciting a bitter harangue against women who would have the gall to sleep with him and expect him to remember their name the next day, as though this was a lot of impish fun.

 

I mean, this fuckin' guy, amiright?

 

In the defense of TAINTED, I would point out that it took time before it was clear that the balance of power had shifted, and that the nerds had definitively shifted from taking cathartic pot shots at their social betters to ugly, sadistic punching down. They still felt powerless, and their own misery blinded them somewhat to their burgeoning position to do real harm.

 

In fact, that misery is a key element to understanding the form this cultural shift took. The angsty early 90’s had turned self-destructive anguish into something akin to heroism, and the culture was ready to lean into it. Even at their most savagely misogynistic, the nerds knew, at least on some level, that their grievances were more deeply rooted in self-hatred than in unfair oppression. In yet another cringy monologue, TAINTED’s J.T. drives away a friendly female bar patron with his caustic self-loathing, and the movie clearly recognizes that he’s the problem, not her. But at the same time, it’s so consumed by his self-sabotaging unhappiness that it’s utterly incapable of imagining her as a being with any inner life whatsoever. Ryan has a similar scene just minutes later, when another former one-night stand excoriates him for… well, again it’s not really clear, exactly. The movie seems to vaguely understand from pop culture that women want you to call them back after sex, but has no more explanation as to why that might be than it has explanation for why women are so desperate to sleep with this doofus in the first place. Women are, if not actively hostile, at least alien creatures whose desires and motivations are inscrutable to the point of meaningless abstraction. These scenes are about the boys’ feelings about themselves – the women are just props, objects by which the men to evaluate their relative strengths and weaknesses. The movie wants Ryan to have some conflict over his status as an unmoored lothario –something it obviously takes from CLERKS**, which locates its own pathos in its characters self-destructive misery—but the point is to foreground his own alienation, not to seriously interrogate his behavior and its consequences for others. Which has the effect of seriously limiting TAINTED's perspective. It understands why socially awkward pop-culture nerds feel alienated and put-upon, but is utterly unable to see anything beyond them. It's why the movie so persistently mistakes whiny sarcasm for comedic truth-telling. Self-flagellation, it turns out, is a kind of all-consuming narcissism in its own right. Telling it like it is sounds great, but you also reveal something about yourself by what subjects you choose to tell about, and what subjects you ignore. 

 

The cumulative effect is of a film –and a time and place—which feels itself to be on the bleeding edge of woke canniness, and yet constantly reveals the unexamined ignorance of its creators –and, by extension, the ethos of its era. It’s a tragic portrait of people eager to speak truth, but too unable to see beyond the limits of their own navel-gazing to discern the truth they want to proclaim. To whit: the movie is very proud of itself for its openly gay vampire –which, in 1998, was at least a little edgy and provocative—but its idea of portraying an out-and-proud, in-your-face gay character is to have him arrogantly bash bisexuals, just to let you know the movie isn’t fucking around with any watered-down half-assed gayness. It recalls Willem Dafoe’s equally cringey homophobic gay character in THE BOONDOCK SAINTS; obviously intended to shake up the squares and dispel some lazy stereotypes about gay men, but at the same time so profoundly lacking in any real understanding of their life and circumstances that it ends up feeling empty and ignorant. It is as clear a case as any you could hope to create as to why simple on-screen representation is not enough. I genuinely believe the filmmakers’ hearts were in the right place, and they showcased a gay character with the intention destigmatizing and challenging stereotypes (as well as showing off how cool and down with it they are), but without any genuine insight into this culture, it just comes off as performative and phony. It certainly makes one consider that there’s a possible upside to having no black characters in the script at all.

 

The only black person in the movie. Sorry, Grant Hill. Your tenure with the Pistons didn't turn out so hot, but you deserved better than this.

 

 

The movie’s inability to consider the perspective of anyone other than its perpetually adolescent white pop culture nerds unfortunately extends to its generic elements as well; for all the time spent bumbling through the vampiric underworld of the Detroit suburbs, it feels disappointingly underdeveloped. And that’s a shame, because there was something potentially kind of funny, maybe even genuinely subversive here. The low budget means that these vamps must eschew the standard Eurotrash decadence we associate with the trope, and tend to lurk in drab apartments and aging, dingy commercial properties. They’re Midwestern vampires; unglamorous, gloomily polite, suffused with a nameless sense of glacial, inevitable societal decay. They’re mostly unhappy but resigned to their vampiric condition, more interested in trying to live semi-normal lives than embracing their supernatural otherness. Here, at least, the filmmakers are on more familiar footing, even if they're not necessarily aware of that fact enough to make much of it. I don’t think this is intentional, but they do somewhat capture the scrappy, mordant angst of the real-life lower-class Rust Belt white people who are more or less playing themselves here. There’s a sense of being quietly damned that comes along with this milieu, the inheritors of a fifty-year-long backslide from dimly remembered glory days, but also a kind of ramshackle pride at soldiering on and building a life amidst the ruins. Vampirism turns out to be a worthwhile evocation of that spirit, and so it’s a shame that the surface is only barely scratched, mostly for the purposes of tin-eared exposition. The movie, of course, never seems remotely aware that it might actually be onto something subtly interesting here; all the protagonists want to do is get back to bickering about BLADE RUNNER. Figures.

 

Consequently, all things considered, TAINTED does not offer the good time promised by VideoHound. But it is something of a timely warning about how wretchedly miserable the 90s were. And not just in terms of amateurishness and stylistic awkwardness and way, way too much agonizingly overwritten "clever" dialogue --although also those things, and very very much of all of them—but just in the sense of how myopic and self-centered much of the vaunted 90’s indie wave was. Part of its initial charm was in the foregrounding of distinct artistic voices, but that turned out to have something of an unforeseen dark side, as the very distinctness of those voices was frequently an effect of their unrelenting self-absorption. Kurt Cobain was a hero to so many young people because of how deeply in touch he was with his own pain – but that very insight was so overwhelming that it made him selfish, in a way, so unable to see beyond his own pain that he ended up killing himself, in the process orphaning his two-year-old daughter. A suitable metaphor, maybe for the whole decade: taking stock of one’s own inner world was a necessary course correction after the punishing emotional superficiality of the preceding Reagan years, and arguably a step towards a kinder, more empathetic culture. But, in retrospect, also a good signpost of how much further we had to go before that same intense awareness of our own pain could be broadened out to include other people.

 

Still, at least Nirvana rocked. TAINTED very much does not rock. It isn’t even mic’d adequately. What few appealing ideas it possesses get completely lost in a sea of bloviating pop culture doggerel and petty sarcasm, which it disastrously offers as entertainment. Maybe in 1998, it really was a little bit exciting for nerds like me to see ourselves on screen – but today, in 2020, it reads more like a wince-inducing cautionary tale of just how intolerable people like me are capable of being, especially when they were trying to emulate others. Speaking of which, the credits end with an extensive list of “Thank yous” to other artists, “for their inspiration.” The list includes the expected Kevin Smith and Tarantino, along with David Fincher (who had only just released THE GAME), Tim Burton, um, Dennis Miller (?), and Martin Brest (BEVERLY HILLS COP, MEET JOE BLACK[?], GIGLI). But also Ken Russell, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers, Peter Greenaway, Abel Ferrara, John Woo, and Carl Franklin (ONE FALSE MOVE, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS). Honestly, it's a pretty good list of inspirations. Those guys were, by and large, the real deal.

 

Proof enough that you can like the right things and still not get it at all.

 

 

 

Still, the movie begins with a Sarah McLachlan quote, apparently in complete earnestness. That's just barely lame enough to be endearing, and I find myself unable to wholly condemn it. It's pretty rough watching, but it's also a little unfair for me to saddle this one tiny indie flick with the accumulated social problems of an entire era. And after all, I'm just some asshole writing reviews on the internet; these guys actually did what I desperately wanted to back in 1998: they made a film. A film that looks a heck of a lot like it probably would have looked if I had scraped together enough pennies to shoot one of my own impossibly-pleased-with-its-own-cleverness teenage pitches. If it's hard to watch, it's at least in part due to my own chagrin at this time-capsule mirror into my own myopic adolescence. I take it, then, as a humbling opportunity to do what TAINTED can't: introspect. Take stock of where I am, what I'm doing to others, and how far I still have to go to get where I should be. After all, in 20 years I'll probably be looking back at myself and whatever the 2020 equivalent of TAINTED might be with just as much disgust. 

 

Even so, I like to think that if I'd made this movie I'd at least have got some gore in there somewhere. I mean, I'm not a monster. The 90's were bad, and that's not TAINTED's fault. But at least they usually had more whammy than this. 

 

             

 

*In fact, the movie it most structurally resembles is Steven Seagal’s OUT FOR JUSTICE. But it really makes one realize that the Aikido, and possibly the ponytail, were a big part of what makes that one good.

 

** Since his influence is never far from the movie, I think it’s worth noting that whatever Kevin Smith’s problems may be, I don’t think this sort of passive misogyny is among them. The female characters in his films are typically about as well-drawn as his male characters, which makes sense, given that everyone in a Kevin Smith movie, regardless of sex, race or creed, all just talk like Kevin Smith anyway. Still, it’s worth noting that the vanguard of the indie film boom of the 90’s featured more interesting and varied female roles than most of the films that subsequently tried to rip them off.

 

 

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2020 CHECKLIST!

The Man Who Queue Too Much

 

TAGLINE	If it ever had one, it’s not included on the blatantly misleading Troma DVD cover, which depicts two buxom vampires who are absolutely not in the movie.
TITLE ACCURACY	The plot sort of centers around a vampire “tainting” the water supply, although it’s a weird title any way you want to look at it
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Vampires, horror-comedy
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None; although Ryan is depicted as a bit of a cad, there’s never any suggestion that his sexual encounters were anything but wholeheartedly consensual.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No animals
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	Nope
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None, as far as we know these vamps cannot turn into bats or wolves or anything
VOYEURISM?	A short, and unusually adequately-constructed, stalking sequence opens the film
MORAL OF THE STORY	The cooler something seems at the time, the more embarrassing it’s going to seem 20 years later.

 

 

 

I Know What You Did Last Summer and the Problem With the 90's

 

 

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 13^th 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

 

TAGLINE	If you’re going to bury the truth, make sure it stays buried. Good advice.
TITLE ACCURACY	Literally written out during the course of the movie. Another potential title would be I KNOW WHO KILLED ME.
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
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.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No animals
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No, and not even the suggestion thereof
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	A room full of spooky mannequins.
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Although we never get the killer’s eye view, he’s definitely stalking them and watching them.
MORAL OF THE STORY	I don’t think I’m gonna be able to do better than the tagline here.