I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
Directed by Jim Gillespie
After an accident on a winding road, four teens make the fatal mistake of dumping their victim's body into the sea. Exactly one year later, the deadly secret resurfaces as they're stalked by a hook-handed figure.
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10 films that influenced I Know What You Did Last Summer
What critics say influenced I Know What You Did Last Summer
"I Know What You Did Last Summer" is head and shoulders above earlier "dead teenager movies" (as Robert Ebert liked to call them) such as "Friday the 13th" (1980) and "Prom Night" (1981).
By the way, the mountain road that they are driving along is the exact same highway from Hitchcock’s The Birds .
"I Know What You Did Last Summer" is head and shoulders above earlier "dead teenager movies" (as Robert Ebert liked to call them) such as "Friday the 13th" (1980) and "Prom Night" (1981).
But it still falls short of the sheer technical brilliance of the original "Halloween" (1978) or the sly satire of "Scream" (1996).
Although Black Christmas predates John Carpenter's film by four years, Halloween is the one that popularized the formula for almost every slasher movie that followed it, from Friday the 13th to A Nightmare on Elm Street to I Know What You Did Last Summer.
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Blurbs-of-interest: Hewitt and Prinze returned for the cheeseball sequel; Gellar had a cameo in Scream 2; Anne Heche played Janet Leigh’s role in the 1998 Psycho remake.
Taking its cue from such stalk 'n' slash low-budgeters as Happy Birthday to Me and Prom Night, I Know What You Did Last Summer slickly resurrects so many of the hallowed trappings of those films that it might as well be a long-lost cousin.
And sure, she finds herself on the killer’s boat (there’s a reason he’s always in a fisherman’s slicker) at the end, whereupon she trips on a few corpses, but, all in all, Wendy Torrance in The Shining she is not.
While the latter is getting most of the airplay for now, the soundtrack album (sadly, sans Debney) also features L7 covering Blue Oyster Cult's "This Ain't the Summer of Love," Toad the Wet Sprocket's weak take on the Beatles' "Hey Bulldog" from the Yellow Submarine soundtrack and original tunes by The Offspring, Green Apple Quick Step, Southern Culture on the Skids, Our Lady Peace, Korn and others (as is becoming the norm, few of them actually seem to have been used in the movie).
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Who knows, it works for me just the same as My Bloody Valentine or Terror Train.
It's high time for the young generation of filmgoers to stop throwing their money at Urban Legends, the I Know What You Did Last Summer movies, Gus Van Sant's Psycho, The Faculty, and of course The Rage: Carrie 2 -- and see what a real horror movie is.