I Still Know What You Did Last Summer . Newcity Chicago . 11-16-98

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer

DIRECTED BY: Danny Cannon

REVIEWED: 11-16-98

Neve Campbell's unwittingly more skanky counterpart, Jennifer Love Hewitt, returns to the big screen in this adequately suspenseful and sometimes surprising sequel to well... you know. When she and college pal Brandy win tickets to a Caribbean resort, it's time for a Holiday from Hell with the requisite shady hotel staff, impending hurricane, thwarted lovemaking, false alarms and delayed discovery. But although there are some bits of inventiveness (scenes incorporating karaoke and tanning beds capitalize on Hewitt's college-bim persona), the conceit of the wink-wink, splatter-free horror film is already tedious and un-scary. Most of the suspense is shallow, and the two stars, already famous in their own right, often look as though they're having lotsa fun, doing the trendy horror film thing. (It always lent the horror films of the seventies and eighties a bit of extra menace: knowing that the leads, hot kids with big dreams all, were most likely to wind up like the very characters they played--given the axe and never heard from again.) It's almost as if, fed up with all our rants about its gratuitous sex and violence, Hollywood's sanitized scary movies and handed us a far more disturbing variety of horror in recent indie depictions of middle class life, i.e. "Your Friends and Neighbors" and "Happiness." Now, I'm just about ready again for the pleasantly irrelevant experience of watching someone's head being ripped from his spinal cord. Perhaps in its next sequel "I Know What You Did Last Summer" will return with some earnestly-wrought gore, seeing as how a few mysteries remain unsolved--the least of which being why our heroine feels compelled to sleep in a bra.

--Ellen Fox

Capsule Reviews
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer

Other Films by Danny Cannon
Judge Dredd

Film Vault Suggested Links
Maniac
Werewolf of London
Silent Night, Deadly Night

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