THE AISLE SEAT - "I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER"
by Mike McGranaghan
The movie-obsessed character played by Jamie Kennedy in Scream 2 said that there are certain rules that horror movie sequels must follow: 1.) there has to be a bigger body count; 2.) the death scenes must be more elaborate; and 3.) if you want your sequel to become a franchise, don't kill off all your characters. Of course, he also said that sequels suck. The guy might well have been talking about I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, a much-gorier follow-up to last year's sleeper hit of the same name (minus the word "still").
Actually, a better title might have been "I Still Know What You Did Two Summers Ago" for it has been two years since Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and boyfriend Ray (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) accidentally hit a man with their car and tossed his body in the lake. The man wasn't dead and came back to exact revenge on Julie and her friends for what they did (hey, he was injured, he was ticked...he had a reason). Dressed in a rain slicker and carrying a hook, the killer stalked the teens who ran him over before getting lost at sea in the film's finale (the "His Body Was Never Found" syndrome).
For the sequel, Julie and her roommate Karla (pop singer Brandy) win a vacation to a remote island in the Bahamas. Karla takes along her boyfriend Tyrell (Mekhi Pfeiffer) and Julie takes along a friend named Will (Matthew Settle) after Ray bows out. Once there, they discover that the killer is on the island, ready to finish what he started. Ray discovers what's going on, and races to the island to save Julie.
One of the unusual things about I Still Know... is that it goes to great lengths to make the audience aware of how deserted this island is. We are told that the hotel is empty because it's the last weekend of the season before the storms set in. We are told that most of the regular staff is already gone. We are told that the last ferry off the island has left and won't return for days. Despite this, the island scenario seems to have been chosen not because it was scary, but because it allowed the filmmakers to show Jennifer Love Hewitt and Brandy in bikinis and other cleavage-revealing get-up at every turn.
There are many problems with the movie, most of them structural. I enjoyed the original because it had an unsettling premise. The kids made a drunken mistake, and the killer was out to exact revenge for what they did; Julie and company faced a terrifying consequence for their bad judgment. The sequel doesn't have that underlying moral theme. Other people on the island include a cranky bartender (Jennifer Esposito of TV's "Spin City"), a drug dealer, and a snooty hotel manager. These extraneous characters exist mostly to get killed. But what did they do? They didn't wrong the killer, so why are they being routinely hacked apart?
As for the scare scenes, some of them are pretty lame. Like the one in which Julie is locked in a tanning bed after the killer places a little plastic clasp over the handles. The characters go into streams of panic when all that's needed is a pair of scissors to snip the plastic off. Again, the scene is more an excuse to linger on close-ups of Hewitt's half-naked body than to do anything legitimately scary. (Let it never be said that this film didn't know who its target audience was.)
And did I mention that it took me about 5 minutes to guess the "surprise" plot twist that comes 90 minutes later?
Yes, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is a pretty bad movie. Of course, I don't really go into teen slasher movies expecting to see Citizen Kane, either. The movie is almost enjoyably trashy at times. I even jumped at one point, although that may have been caused by the deafening metallic clank used to signify terror on the digital soundtrack rather than by the events on screen. Also, Hewitt and Brandy (two very talented, appealing young stars) bring a lot of energy to their roles, even in the midst of the silliness and repeated plot holes. It's even a perverse thrill to hear squeaky-clean Brandy tossing off the f-word with casualness.
Regardless, I Still Know... is further indication that the horror revival introduced by the Scream pictures is on its way out. Studios are scrambling for slash-em-ups so intently that they aren't paying attention to quality. September brought us Urban Legend, and now we have this one. The door is left open for another sequel. I have an idea for it: a movie studio is about to greenlight yet another subpar teen slasher pic, but the fisherman comes in and hooks everyone before production can start. Sound good?
(
out of four)
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