I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)
Directed by Danny Cannon
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Now it’s time for the gloves to come off. There was a lot I didn’t like about I Know What You Did Last Summer, but I recognize that there was good filmmaking and acting there, it just wasn’t always properly utilized. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer does not have that problem. Every silly concept, every dumb idea, every absurd circumstance that the first movie kind of made work comes crashing down here in new and exciting ways. Sometimes that’s fun. Sometimes it’s painful. I’ve bigged it up enough so now I need to get into the thick of it and explain why I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is so bad, pull up a chair, this could take a while.
Time For Everyone’s Favorite Thing, Retcons!
Our story picks up about a year after the end of the first film, and does my favorite thing for sequels to do, completely retcon the ending of the first movie! Some spoilers from the first movie, two of our heroes, Julie and Ray, survived and had a happy ending, a happy ending that is completely undone and declared a dream. The relationship troubles between Julie and Ray intensify as Julie goes on a Bahamas-bound vacation that her friend won in a contest, while Ray is unable to join for a variety of stupid reasons. While in the Bahamas, Julie must fend off the romantic advances of a new friend while at the same time dealing with the trauma from the previous film. This is made even more complicated by the possible reappearance of the killer from the first film. With the island paradise turning more into a prison with each passing day, Julie struggles against an opponent who may exist only in her mind.
Oh God Are There Any Good Characters Here?
You may be saying, “Well that doesn’t sound too bad, what’s wrong with this movie?” There’re many many reasons, but let’s start with the characters. Every single person here, save maybe Julie, is an idiot, an asshole, or both. Julie has a class with a guy, Will, who her friend Karla keeps trying to get her to cheat on her boyfriend Ray with. Why would Karla do this, you ask? Is Ray a bad person? Do Julie and Will have Earth-shaking romantic chemistry? Is Karla secretly evil? No. She just thinks cheating is awesome. She has a match made in heaven though, because her boyfriend, Ty, is just as bad. When we’re first introduced to Ty we don’t know he is Karla’s boyfriend and he is so insistently hitting on Karla to get her to stop working and dance with him that I assumed he was just a creep who bothers her at work. He somehow becomes less endearing as the story continues, when he loudly and frequently accuses Julie of “being crazy” when she starts seeing evidence of the return of the killer from the first film.
Okay, There’s One.
The best character is the comic relief pool boy who is constantly trying to get everyone to smoke weed with him. This pool boy wears exclusively Hawaiian shirts, has massive white guy dreads, and is played to perfection by our generation’s champion, Jack Black. I’m not sure if my love of Jack Black is ironic or genuine anymore, but I loved every second he was on-screen because he annoyed all the jackass characters with his weed antics, and anyone who messes with this group is alright in my book. I’d like to think that Black was supposed to be a perfectly normal pool boy but then when shooting started he showed up super high and with massive dreads and just wouldn’t stop ad-libbing lines about weed. I know that’s probably not what happened, but it’s the only source of joy I had with this movie!
Illogical, But Not In A Fun Way.
Sadly the story is not fun, and how it starts perfectly sets the tone for how dumb the plot is. The first major plot point is that a radio station calls Karla and asks her a trivia question to win a prize. I know radio stations aren’t quite what they once were, but I’m sure you can tell me what’s suspicious about that set-up and why no one in the late 90s would assume this was legit. So then Karla, Julie, Ty, and Will all head to the Bahamas so they can spend their 4th of July weekend in luxury, only to learn that the day they arrived was the last day before Hurricane season (which July 3rd isn’t) and there’s a massive hurricane headed towards the island, which is, for some reason still open even though there are only two rooms booked at the resort and a weather emergency is set to happen. So many more dumb things happen, but I don’t have time to list them all!
Not The Kind of Feel-Bad I Look For In Movies.
What I do have time to list is the offensive things that happen. Early in the movie Karla actually says the phrase, “No means yes.” when Julie says she doesn’t want to dance with Ty, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of how much shitty offensive stuff happens. Early after arriving, the party runs into the maitre’d who is a racist asshole (Karla and Ty are black) who racists at them. The reason why you would have a racist jackass like this in a movie is, of course, to see the killer murder them so you can at least enjoy that. Guess who disappoints everyone by dying off-screen? But don’t worry, plenty of people die on-screen, notably the innocent black workers of the hotel and also Karla’s boyfriend. I’d say this is untimely, but I can’t think of a time when this would be welcome.
The Ending Is Exactly What You’d Expect.
And in the usual What You Did Last Summer fashion, the ending is barely comprehensible. A series of reveals and twists so unlikely to ever happen would kill the believability of the story if there was ever any to begin with. I could easily double the length of this review by trying to explain what that ending was. I’m just going to leave this as it is though because I need to save for energy. Because the next movie I’m talking about it I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer and that is somehow even worse.
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