“Helen gets her hair chopped off, Julie gets a body in her trunk, and you get a letter? That’s balanced!”

Justin’s rating: What am I reviewing this for?!

Justin’s review: Despite being swept up into the teen horror resurgence of the late ’90s and early 2000s, I didn’t ever feel the need to rush out and watch I Know Something Something Last Autumn. I’m not quite sure why, but I guess once I saw the scene where Jennifer Love Hewitt demonstrates her spinning ability while screaming to no one in particular, I felt that I had the gist.

But I can’t ignore it forever, because this movie knows what I did this summer.* I got a bit nostalgic for these slashers and Kevin Williamson’s scripts, and I finally bit into a piece of forbidden fruit I’d been overlooking since 1997.

Plus, it’s hard to ignore the absolute stacked cast of I Know What You Did Last Summer. There’s Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ryan Broforce Phillipe, Anne Itchy Heche, Freddie Prinze Jr., Bridgette Weasel Wilson, and Johnny Come Marching Home Galecki. Heck, with Prinze Jr. and Gellar here, I could even envision this as a prequel to Scooby Doo!

These are some cool people to hang out with — I’ll never get tired of how Love Hewitt smiles with her eyes — and Williamson was churning out banger after banger scripts during that era, including Scream, The Faculty, Halloween H20, and Teaching Mrs. Tingle. But what I only learned later was that Williamson wrote this before Scream and nobody picked it up… until he was suddenly hot stuff and deserving of some rummaging around his rejected pile.

Four teens, celebrating Buffy winning a beauty pageant, accidentally hit someone while driving back from the beach. Instead of calling for help, they panic and dump the still-living body into the water. One year later, and a mysterious figure begins to terrorize each of them with notes and other psyche-outs. The situation quickly escalates to murder, with a rain slicker-wearing fisherman gutting people with a giant hook.

But because this is a Williamson movie, there’s a mystery to be solved amidst the slashings, and it’s here that I Know What You Did Last Summer is wee bit more clever than you’d first assume. I mean, this is not an Agatha Christie novel or anything, but the identity of the killer and the motive is just as much a part of the entertainment here. Perhaps more so, because it’s not like these killings are all that creative.

Maybe that’s why I never felt a huge urge to see this. Scream had a ton of very likable characters, great quotes, genuinely funny moments, memorable kills, and a well-thought out mystery. This? This feels like leftovers — still filling but not as good.

Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Julie does struggle with the horrible thing they did and agreed to cover up, and you can see it eating her up inside — and that’s before she starts getting threatening letters promising retribution. I sympathize with her a whole lot more than Phillipe’s Barry, who is so angry and unlikable that I’m glad I don’t really have fond feelings for him from other projects. I also didn’t like having to deal with Bridgette Wilson being a jerk, which seems to be her character’s sole defining trait. Her milk will never be our milk.

The psychological torture of these young adults is more amusing than scary, though. The absolute best is when Julie hears noises coming from her car trunk — admittedly creepy — and finds a dead body covered with living crabs. But in the span of Julie’s quick dash in and then out of the house to grab some witnesses, the killer has somehow (a) removed every crab, (b) taken out the dead body, and (c) perfectly detailed the trunk. In broad daylight, no less.**

While there are some decent suspense and iconic bits, I Know What You Did Last Summer had a hard time getting me on board with it. I think that’s because most horror flicks ask you to identify with the main characters and their plight. It’s a whole “what would I do in this situation?” thing. But here, these four make an initial decision that almost nobody would do — and certainly not in the way that it unfolds here. So it lost me almost right away.

I Know What a Long Movie Title This Is is honestly kind of a middling slasher at best with a really boring villain, and I suspect that if it wasn’t for Williamson’s recent success and the popular cast, it wouldn’t have been the minor hit that it became.

*Mostly gaming, a stint on the comedy circuit, and freelancing for the CIA.

**You’d think that shellfish and a rotting corpse would leave behind a scent, too. I want to see the movie where this guy is a car detailer with supernatural abilities to make any disgusting space fresh and clean.

Intermission!

• This turned into a strange franchise, with a sequel in 1998, an unconnected straight-to-video sequel in 2006, Amazon TV adaptation in 2021, and a proper legacy sequel in 2025.
• Future spouses Gellar and Prinze Jr. barely speak to each other in this movie — only twice — despite being part of the core four characters
• Fish float!
• “Yo chum bait, take a hike!”
• Don’t tell a ghost story the wrong way in a Kevin Williamson movie
• Yeah don’t show his face or anything
• Was Johnny Galecki always 20 years old?’
• Barry is such a raging jerk
• Love Hewitt’s giant bangs
• “Are you on drugs?”
• “You did a lot of things last summer.” “Well, only one murder comes to mind.”
• “I don’t blame you. But I don’t want to know you either.”
• That’s some good backwards driving at night
• Oh man, old school internet browser and nested windows, so much nostalgia
• Creepy noises from the trunk
• Most of the killings in this movie are pretty light on gore
• Police cars are super-easy to break out of
• I like that the Fisherman takes the time to hide under mannequin plastic
• Well now the killer can attach a hook to his stump and cosplay as Captain Hook