I Know What You Did Last Summer(1997)
A year later, Julie returns home from college for the summer. The friends have gone their separate ways. Julie receives a letter with no return address, stating, "I know what you did last summer!" Julie tracks down Helen, and they take the note to Barry, who suspects Max. They confront Max on the docks, and Barry threatens him with a hook. Julie meets Ray, who now works as a fisherman; he unsuccessfully tries to reconcile with her. Later, Max is killed by a figure in a rain slicker wielding a hook. Barry discovers a note in his gym locker saying, "I know." He is ambushed by the same assailant driving Barry's car.
I Know What You Did Last Summer(1997)
Four graduating high school seniors, couples Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Barry (Ryan Phillippe), are looking forward to graduation and promising young-adult lives as beauty queens and football heroes. But, driving recklessly after a night of drinking and cuddling on the beach, they run over a stranger. Hothead Barry, perceiving their bright tomorrows in jeopardy, has them dump the body in the sea and swears them all to secrecy. Horrifically, the mangled victim, going under, appears to be still alive. A year later, college-student Julie gets a ransom-style note reading, "I know what you did last summer," which compels her to reunite with her since-estranged friends, who claim ignorance about who could have sent the note and why. Barry suspects it came from a much-disliked schoolmate who had encountered them that grim night, and he tries to intimidate the kid with bullying. But then this suspect turns up murdered himself -- just the opening of a series of stalkings and killings.
But what I Know What You Did Last Summer does have is a sort of morality -- insofar as the youths' covering up their misdeed has negative repercussions, and not just the obvious, gory ones. Under the cloud of what they did last summer, the once-close quartet drifts apart. Their suspicions, eventually directed against each other, make them easier targets for the real villain. It might be noted that the burden of guilt gets lightened a little by a surprise plot twist: The road accident had actually interrupted a murder-in-progress, and the victim was doomed anyway. Alfred Hitchcock this isn't, although scriptwriter Kevin Williamson came closer to that lofty ambition with the similarly bloody but dark-humored Scream and its sequels, effective whodunits styled as semi-humorous takeoffs of slasher movies such as this one.
Max's presence at the scene of the crime made him an obvious suspect. Not one for subtlety, Barry threatened Max with a fishhook. Max legitimately didn't know what they did last summer, but he was killed by the man who did. Adding insult to (fatal) injury, Ben used Max's corpse to play mind games with his real targets. He stuffed it, along with some live crabs, in the trunk of Julie's car.
A barrier forced Officer Caporizo to take a detour down an alley, where he encountered what appeared to be a stranded motorist. It turned out to be Ben, who dispatched Caporizo with a hook to the stomach. He became the second collateral victim in Ben's murder spree, but he wasn't the last.
Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt; The Tuxedo), Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar; Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Barry (Ryan Phillippe; Cruel Intentions), and Ray (Freddie Prinze, Jr.; Scooby-Doo) are carefree teens enjoying their last summer before they head their separate ways after high school. However, they accidentally hit something on the road and when they turn around to see what it was, it turns out to be a man, they believe they have killed. Afraid to go to the police, they all agree to dump the body and never speak of what happened again. One year later, Julie is home from college and receives a note saying, "I know what you did last summer".
Williamson created a solid career for himself within the might horror genre, especially by appealing to a young demographic. I know What You Did Last Summer is a perfect example of this. As his second movie, it could have made or broken his career, and luckily it was the former. It is an enjoyable film in what I like to call the "Horror Lite" category. It brings together a talented cast with a great script and a strong director, making it the perfect storm (almost) of teen-oriented horror movies.
From the jump, Amazon's I Know What You Did Last Summer series had big shoes to fill. The 1973 Lois Duncan book was most famously adapted into a 1997 film starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., Ryan Phillippe, and Jennifer Love Hewitt. The story follows a group of teenagers who hit and kill someone with their car. They then dispose of the body, only to discover a year later that someone knows what they did. And furthermore, someone wants to kill them for what they did.
"It's not that we weren't on the same page, I knew what the correct choices were for the Ray character. He wanted a different actor, a really good actor named Jeremy Sisto, who I know and I like and respect very very much," Prinze Jr. said.
Directed by Jim Gillespie and written by Kevin Williamson, who also wrote Scream, the movie followed a group of North Carolina teens who accidentally hit a pedestrian while driving. They decide to dump the body and never discuss what happened, but one year later, they start receiving mysterious notes from someone who seems to know what they did.
As soon as the horror sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer was announced, the head-scratching commenced. Shouldn't it be "I Still Know What You Did Two Summers Ago," movie watchers wondered? It does of course make a clumsy kind of sense that Ben Willis (Muse Watson), the serial slasher in the rain slicker, armed with a hook, still knows what heroine Julie James did the previous summer (just as one year ago he knew what she did the summer before that). Or, taken another way, the phrase means Ben still hasn't forgotten what took place last summer (why would he?), when Julie spectacularly escaped his murderous clutches. So take that, grammar hounds. He still knows what she she did last summer. Whatever.
But a quarter of a century before, "I Know What You Did Last Summer" knew: You can never go home again. You can never outrun (or outswim) violence. The film tried to warn us: trauma comes back. It always, always knows what was done to us. And it knows what we did. 041b061a72