I Know What You Did Last Summer at 25. BONUS Cinematic Throwback

One of my all time right movies at the right time. 

In 1997 when it came to my movie obsessions nothing beat Scream. After that movie it was all about self-referential teen horror. And I spent the back half of the year obsessively awaiting the sequel. 

But first there was the undercard. IKWYDLS was also written by Kevin Williamson and rushed into production after Scream hit. This thing got made pretty damn fast. They shot it in the waning days of my senior year of high school, and it opened less than a month after I started college. 

But the most important moves were casting Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar. I mean, holy shit. Dream casting. This was the era of actress megafandom, and almost nobody ranked higher. I had been a huge fan of Hewitt's for a while cause of Party Of Five. And Gellar had just recently become a fave cause of Buffy. So yeah, pop these two into just about anything and I was going to be nuts about it. The timing could not have been better.

IKWYDLS is more of a standard kind of slasher movie. It could basically have come out 15 years earlier with few real tweaks. 4 high school seniors (the ladies, plus Ryan Phillippe and Freddie Prinze Jr.) commit a little of the old accidental vehicular manslaughter, dump the body in a lake, and a year later get stalked by the guy who wasn't actually dead. And he goes about hunting them down while dressed as a fisherman and brandishing a giant hook.

It's a much more serious movie than Scream, although it does have a few laughs. But it takes the story seriously and is better for it. There's a real moral backbone to the story. It's not an accident that the only characters to survive are the ones who show real remorse.

The fisherman is not necessarily one of those iconic horror villains. He's suitably intimidating and scary. You understand his motive. The movie does make him kind of ridiculously omnipotent.

The movie throws in a handful of extra characters to be killed. It's amusing now seeing a pre-Big Bang Theory Johnny Galecki.

Phillippe is well suited to playing a complete prick. Prinze is kind of a blank slate pussy (one of the best gags in Scary Movie plays off that).

Honestly you could have put any 2 actors in there, I was still gonna be laser focused on Hewitt and Gellar. As with her part in Scream 2 I had trouble accepting Gellar as a damsel in distress type. But she's awesome in this, and gives great scream queen. She also gets the movie's best sequence, long chase in which she is eventually killed.

But it is definitely Hewitt's movie most of all. She has the most screen time, the biggest arc as the film's moral center. Oh she gives good scream queen too. That really seemed to be a big deal back then. And it's a great performance. I really don't quite understand why her movie career never really popped. I think maybe she just chose some bad projects (indeed her post-1998 IMDB is kind of brutal). And then ended up doing some TV shows that did little for me.

The film is a little more of a suspense thriller than a horror movie most of the time, but it has some scares (I still remember my packed sneak preview audience getting freaked out by a couple of em). And the kills are mostly memorable. And the film makes creative use of its fishing boat climax. And I do still love that jump scare finale, even if the sequel retconned it into a dream.

So why has the movie slipped some over time? I don't know. It's certainly easily rewatchable. Hell, I saw it I think 6 times in the theater, and it was one of the very first DVDs I bought. I just think it was such a movie off that moment that it couldn't not fade some. And while there was a sequel, which I still think is underrated, it did not endure as a franchise.

But for the fall of 1997, nothing was bigger. No movie meant more.