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I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

Rate: 1
Viewed: 4/25

WhatDid1
4/25: What do you call a film that features four of the worst thespians alive: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, and Freddie Prinze, Jr.?

I Know What You Did Last Summer. Scream was the beginning of a new slasher cycle by putting capital H into hip. The rest that followed did everything as possible to ruin it through awful acting, manipulation, and stupidity. This one is no exception.

When Jennifer Love Hewitt screamed in the middle of the street, "What are you waiting for???," her credibility as an actress instantly dropped to zero forever. I've always hated Ryan Phillippe since day one. His character is a "college quarterback"? Ha! He'll be more believable as a gay porn actor. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze, Jr., are nothing but dopes with pretty boy/girl looks. And what do you know? They ended up being married to each other.

It's quite hard to believe that three characters having nothing to do with the July 4 incident got killed while the four leads were able to be free and unbothered for so long considering they started the whole thing in the first place. That being said, why do I have to care about them? They deserved to die. Murder? No, it wasn't. Manslaughter is the correct word, but all will get off the hook if they simply reported what happened to the police. That's because the guy was walking out of the blue on a desolate road in the middle of the night.

Oh, boy...the manipulations. They are endless. One of them is Julie finding a dead body along with crabs in the trunk of her car. The next minute, it's gone. Helen sees Barry being murdered on the balcony, and she and a cop run to there and find nothing. By the way, is her hair supposed to be falling apart, especially during the parade? Plenty of guys wear the same fisherman outfit despite the fact that I've never seen anyone donning it in my whole life. Ditto for the cliff that will never be found anywhere on the coastline of North Carolina. They're ice cubes inside the storage room that Julie climbed into? Uh, right. Let me know when they feel chilly.

How about the explanation of what actually happened on July 4? I don't think so. It's a convenient way of letting everybody off the hook by saying they didn't kill anybody after all and the guy who got hit was a murderer. It's called "hit and run." Duh. While they were freaking out about what's going on, I thought Anne Heche's character might have done it despite the killer looking like a man the whole time. That would've been par for the course.

All in all, I Know What You Did Last Summer is zero in everything, most especially talent.