If you are going to make a teen slasher movie, make sure you have enough characters to keep the carnage moving. You can only almost kill people so many times before the movie feels like a pre-teen television horror show trying not to offend its audience.
"I Know What You Did Last Summer," the latest horror movie from "Scream" screenwriter Kevin Williamson, only gives us four characters. And we know those four have to stay around for the final bloodbath in the end, so for the rest of the movie we have to make due with near killings and characters we barely know turning up dead.
These four friends are on their way home from partying heavily during their last summer together before college when they accidentally run a man over. Fearing their futures are in jeopardy, they decide to dump the body and never speak of the incident again.
One year later, the four return to their sleepy North Carolina fishing village with their lives having been destroyed by the accident.
Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt of "Party of Five") is the intellectual who has turned pale and aloof since that fateful night. Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.), Julie's now ex-boyfriend, gave up on dreams of a career in New York to work as a fisherman.
Barry (Ryan Phillippe) had hoped for football stardom, but is now just an alcoholic. And his ex-girlfriend Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) never followed up on her beauty pageant success.
But if the pain eating them up from the inside is not enough, someone sends them a letter which reads "I know what you did last summer." Soon, a psycho in a black fisherman's outfit is stalking them wielding a fishhook.
Is it one of the four friends playing a game? Is the person they hit really dead? Does Anne Heche, as the backwoods, chicken-killing sister of the deceased, have anything to do with it?
Do we care?
There are essentially two categories of successful horror films. There are the good horror films ("The Shining," "Poltergeist") which take themselves seriously and manage to scare us on a more intellectual level. And there are the good, bad horror films ("The Evil Dead," "A Nightmare on Elm Street"), which throw in everything but the kitchen sink and regardless of how stupid they are, you cannot help but have a good time.
"I Know What You Did Last Summer" fits into neither category. Its plot is too much a generic, teen horror piece of fluff to fit into the first category. And it is far too restrained to fit into the second.
Sure, the killer walks slowly and never speaks like some of our other great film psycho killers, but he takes such little pleasure in his work. He just kills quickly and then leaves.
Like the killer, the film is just going through the motions of a horror movie. With "Scream," screenwriter Williamson satirized horror movie cliches. With "I Know What You Did Last Summer" he uses them as shamelessly as his predecessors. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with that. Many good films have followed those horror movie rules which Williamson satirized.
But for a screenwriter who proved with "Scream" that he has a dark, biting sense of humor, his latest effort is surprisingly lame. He adds nothing to the genre, settling to make the same sort of interchangeable horror film which flooded the screens in the 1980s.
Director Jim Gillespie has a great deal of technical efficiency, but does not know how to make a horror movie. A horror movie is, by definition, sensational. Its job is to generate cheap thrills by whatever means possible, but Gillespie does not seem willing to go all the way.
Gillespie refrains from giving us what Steve Martin in "Grand Canyon" called the "money shot," that shot where heads blow up and blood spews. Instead we see either a close-up of the victims face as they are being gauged elsewhere or see it all from a distance.
It is a rare horror movie occasion to leave the theater wishing there was more blood, more corpses and a few more dismemberments.
