Screenwriter Kevin Williamson got himself somewhere in the late 90s as the writer of teenage slasher flicks. Working with director Wes Craven, the two put together Scream, a self-aware sort of movie where both the characters and the movie knew what audiences were expecting and just had some fun with it. Scream didn’t take itself completely seriously, but Williamson’s other big contribution from around that time was I Know What You Did Last Summer, another movie where a mysterious man stalked and killed a group of teenagers played by the hip and the cool from back then. This one did not treat its subject matter as lightly.
Then again, knowing the two got married and are still together today, I was kinda thrown for a loop when I realized Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Gellar were in the movie together but were paired off with different actors as their respective romantic interests. That just felt kinda weird.
Four teenagers are enjoying a night out after one won a beauty pageant during an annual Fourth of July celebration when they hit and perhaps kill a pedestrian. The foursome are central character Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt); her boyfriend Ray (Prinze), a working class fellow who happened to be driving; Helen (Gellar), the pageant winner with dreams of acting; and Barry (Ryan Phillippe), Helen’s obnoxious boyfriend, the owner of the car who happens to be drunk. Rather than get help, Barry convinces the others to sink the body that may or may not be dead in the nearby ocean and never speak of what happened again.
One year later, Julie returns from a year away at college to find the four are all rather estranged from the incidents of that night. But Julie received a note reading, well, the title of the movie, and a man in a rain slicker does seem to be popping up to terrorize the four even if they have all stopped speaking to each other. Could someone have seen what they did? Did the pedestrian survive? And who is he? Because one thing is certain: he’s dangerous.
All things being equal, this was a well put-together horror-thriller. The central foursome are all distinct in their personalities from the obnoxious Barry to the soft-spoken Ray. Julie, the one who insisted on going for help originally before caving to peer pressure, makes for a good protagonist, and some of the death scenes are put together very well. This movie is stylish and tense when it needs to be, playing off old urban legends that have been told and retold countless times while still feeling like something unique and new.
So why didn’t this grab me that much? Part of it is none of the central foursome are really all that likable as people. It’s hard to want the protagonists to succeed if I find myself somewhat agreeing with the killer at least on a couple of them. True, the killer goes too far by taking out other victims so this is more than just a simple revenge story, but he was stalking four kids, three of whom were rich and privileged and more or less knew it, who had hit him with a car and left him for dead at the bottom of the ocean. Am I supposed to root for the kids? Besides, for all that I have no actual complaints about Jim Gillespie’s direction, he’s no Wes Craven. I can see why this movie was something of a hit when it came out, one of those horror movies from that era where the poster showed a group of young and attractive people standing in a black background with an ominous title floating over their heads, but this movie is mostly just fine and not much else.
Grade: C+
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