Harefooted Halloween: I Know What You Did Last Summer

What I Liked: At times this can be a nice looking movie.  It opens with a majestic helicopter shot of the North Carolina coast (really California) at sunset with waves crashing against the rocks and a showcase of the winding hilly road that will play a pivotal role later.  The camera eventually sweeps all the way around to show someone sitting on the edge of a cliff who will also play a critical role.  Good ominous vibe to get us going.  Cinematographer Denis Crossan (The Real McCoy, Incognito) includes neat shots like these every so often.  However, the night scenes in particular are very dark and it can be difficult to make out what you’re looking at.

Our killer is a dude decked out in a black fisherman’s slicker, big floppy hat, boots and he wields a handheld hook.  You can’t see his face because the collar of the coat and the wide brim of the hat nearly cover him up completely.  I always thought this was a creepy image.  Almost like a take on the grim reaper or an executioner.  Most slashers favor some sort of mask to hide the identity of the perpetrator but here he’s simply faceless and there’s something unsettling about that.  It’s not the first time a hook has been used as a weapon in horror with Candyman being released only five years prior, and you could throw in general pirate plundering imagery, but it effectively stands out here.  And I appreciate that he employs it to dispatch all his victims as opposed to some other titans of terror like Michael Myers or Freddy Kreuger who tend to shy away from using their signature weapons at least half the time.

What I Didn’t Like: So one of the big problems I have with this picture is the setup.  Our four teenage leads accidentally run someone over with their car, panic, dump the body in the ocean and vow to never speak about the incident ever again.  A year later they start to receive letters telling them “I know what you did last summer” and the blood begins to fly.  We’re supposed to like these young adults who made a mistake and in order to avoid fucking up their futures they did what they thought they had to do.  I just have a hard time getting over this initial hump.  Sure, the hit was legitimately an accident and really only one character is a major asshole who talks the rest into covering it up.  But still, I can’t bring myself to be on their side.  I’m not saying they deserve to be stalked, tortured and murdered for what they did but they sure as hell should be brought to justice and deserve a comeuppance.  Now, factors are clumsily revealed later that try to mitigate all the bad shit these friends did (we’ll get there in the spoiler section) but again, they still committed some serious crimes and I don’t feel nearly as sorry for them as I should.

Just about every aspect of this picture is very middle of the road.  Aside from a few cool shots the acting, editing, horror setups, etc. are kinda whatever.  About halfway through a bunch of silly shit starts to get thrown at us like the killer plants a dead body crawling with crabs in the trunk of a protagonist’s car and removes it ten minutes later without a trace.  He also cuts off another person’s hair in their sleep.  It’s not clear why this is done.  To signal he can get to anyone at anytime?  Humiliation?  Mind fuck?

Overall Impressions: This is one of those movies that was huge at the time and difficult to explain why decades later.  Scream came out the year before which kicked off the 90’s slasher revival and was also written by Kevin Williamson (although he wrote I Know first (based on a book from 1973) and it shows).  There was a marketing gimmick to capitalize on this by advertising on the poster “From the creator of Scream” which led to a successful lawsuit claiming it was misleading.  Wes Craven had nothing to do with I Know.  Regardless I’m sure it worked somewhat.  Plus people were excited about slashers again and clamored for more.  Another factor is Jennifer Love Hewitt (Party of Five) and Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as the female leads were on hit TV shows then.  The male leads Ryan Phillippe (One Shot) and Freddie Prinze Jr. (She’s All That) were less known but considered stud muffins all the same.  For a short time the film was inescapable being referenced and parodied nonstop.  For that reason it looms larger in my mind than it probably should.

I saw this when it came out, didn’t care for it then and my opinion hasn’t changed.  It’s a fairly unremarkable slasher that doesn’t offer anything truly unique or clever.  It’s teens getting attacked by a madman padded out with mostly nonsensical and forgettable shit.  With that said it’s totally watchable.  Just don’t expect much.

 

*Spoilers from here on*

Alright, this is the stuff I really wanted to get to.  While the idea of teens trying to figure out the identity of the maniac who’s slaughtering them is straightforward, this picture’s reveal has always confounded me.  We’re led to believe for the entire runtime that the person they killed with their car is a guy named David Egan.  I thought I remembered the killer being David’s father seeking vengeance but that’s wrong.  Then after this watch I attempted to piece together the flow of events, checked against Wikipedia and it turns out I was wrong again!  To shortcut this the bottom line is the kids did not run over David Egan but some other dude named Ben Willis.  He’s out for revenge for himself for not only being maimed but also because the four friends dumped his body in the water and left him for dead.  So at first this appears to be taking a different angle on a standard action revenge movie like Hard to Kill or something.  Ben Willis is simply killing those who tried to kill him.  This would’ve been an interesting approach if they saw it through.  However, that’s not what we got.

Cue the wrinkles.  One is that Ben Willis is an actual murderer who bumped off David Egan earlier that night or the day before or something like that.  David accidentally killed Ben’s daughter so Ben was pretty angry about that.  The other wrinkle is Ben was still alive after the kids ran him over and plopped him in the water so it turns out they didn’t kill anyone at all.  These two items are how the movie attempts to get you on board with what the protagonists did.  The guy they hit was a murderer and they didn’t actually kill him anyway.  All of this is explained in like one quick sentence at the finale making it very easy to miss.  Even if you catch that it’s still difficult to unravel what really happened.  Putting all that crap aside it doesn’t forgive all the other horrible crimes our protagonists still committed at the beginning: vehicular assault, leaving the scene of an accident, conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder, tampering with evidence and who knows what else.

I mean the movie’s dumb enough if you don’t think about it but if you dig deeper it only gets worse.