Movie Review--I Know What You Did Last Summer

"Look, you're all wrong.  They get back to the girl's house, and they find the lunatic's bloody hook in the car door.  Now, that's the original story.  That's the way it really happened."

--Ray, I Know What You Did Last Summer

The late 1900s gave birth to many of today's prolonged slasher franchises, from Child's Play to Nightmare on Elm Street to Halloween.  Among those franchises is I Know What You Did Last Summer.  With an Amazon series on the way, I Know What You Did Last Summer is not quite dead as a franchise quite yet.  It very loosely builds off of a story called "the Hook" about a killer with a hook on his arm who tries to open a car.  A car and a hook both have a prominent role in the film, just in a very different sense than they do in the urban legend.  A fateful accident leads to an act of great selfishness that haunts the protagonists for the next year.  This movie is neither the best nor the worst slasher film, but it is not incompetently crafted.

Production Values

Little to no non-practical effects are called for in a story like this.  To the movie's credit, elaborate but soon-to-be outdated digital effects were not shoehorned in just for the sake of having them, as most, if not all, of what is shown onscreen really is practical effects.  There are no solely supernatural opponents like ghosts or bizarre creatures like werewolves to overcome.  Acted well but almost never given serious depth or transformations, the characters are just what they need to be to stop the overall story from slipping into mediocrity.  Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Ryan Phillippe are all perfectly adequate in their roles as the four main characters, but none of their characters have many scenes that go to more than minimal lengths to establish or build their personalities.  This is, of course, not a negative thing on its own, just an aspect that could have been better!  The murder mystery takes precedence over the depth of how the characters are presented.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

A set of four friends, two couples between them, celebrate their impending departure from high school, eventually talking about the folk story of the escaped convict with a hook trying to open the door of a car with someone inside.  Irresponsibility leads to their car running over a stranger on the drive home.  The man is killed, his body dumped into water after a desperate discussion about how even the accidental killing would land the four in grave trouble.  Only one person stumbles upon them before they can hide the body and is suspicious of the situation.  Just before the body is put in water, though, the victim turns out to still be alive--and yet he is placed in the water all the same.  A year later, Julie, one of the four, comes back to town and finds a note saying "I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER."

Intellectual Content

One of the most specific and unique issues periodically brought up is the supposed symbolism of the hook story, the hook of the convict that is found in the car door allegedly representing a metaphorical castration, with the hook serving (according to one character) as a phallic symbol.  It is one thing for a storyteller to intend such a meaning, no matter how strange or conceptually irrelevant a specific kind of symbolism might be to the story.  It is another thing and an asinine leap to read symbolism into a story where the creator or the text/movie/image/game itself does not establish or even hint at something.  Like in all things, artistic analysis is irrational when someone believes they know from mere appearances what a story is about or when they suggest an interpretation as true or likely with no evidence for it.  Stupidity is stupidity and fallacies are fallacies even with relatively trivial assumptions about the nature of random works of entertainment/art, but this is the same kind of irrationality that is behind dangerous or obviously speculative misinterpretations of even works like the Bible that are more than mere entertainment.

Conclusion

There are horror films (and slasher films in particular) that are far better at bringing thematic and storytelling depth to their plots than I Know What You Did Last Summer.  Candyman, Saw and its sequels, and the reboot of Halloween are all examples of this.  The viewer who approaches I Know What You Did Last Summer recognizing it as a generally competent work that lacks some of the greater depth to be found elsewhere in its genre or subgenre will still find plenty to admire.  For one, its lack of reliance on digital effects is noteworthy.  Its strong acting is as well.  Its sequels which I have not seen might be terrible (or not), but the starting point of the series is far from having such a term fit it.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Several characters are attacked or killed with a hook or a vehicle.  Some blood is seen.

 2.  Profanity:  "Shit" and "fuck" or variations of them are used.