I Know What You Did Last Summer . Tucson Weekly . 10-27-97

I Know What You Did Last Summer

DIRECTED BY: Jim Gillespie

REVIEWED: 10-27-97

Four teenagers suffer through guilt, anonymous taunting, and ice-pick impalement a year after they accidentally run over an unidentified man and dump the body in the ocean. Who knows their secret? Is one of them the culprit? And will the road to revelation be paved with creatively grisly murders? Actually, this time the killer's murder methods are pretty standard (no garage doggy-door executions here), so Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson just fills the picture with dozens of jolting scares. This old-fashioned emphasis works fine--the almost entirely teenage audience shrieked on several occasions--and Williamson sneaks in all the witty, self-referential lines he can. It's just too bad the story, based on Lois Duncan's 1934 book, resorts to so many conventional mystery mechanics. With its many dull, talky stretches, the movie often plays like a violent episode of Scooby Doo. On the plus side, I Know What You Did... wins teen bonus points for its attractive if not necessarily charismatic cast of cocky hunks and chesty nymphs, many fresh from the land of television: Freedy Prinze, Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt (Party of Five) and Sarah Michelle Gellar (the Buffy the Vampire Slayer show). And Anne Heche is amusingly creepy as a lonesome hick; somebody should set her up with the kid from Deliverance.

--Woodruff

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I Know What You Did Last Summer
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I Know What You Did Last Summer

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