I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998) – Review

As the silver age of the slasher film radiated out from the seismic crater created from Scream, it soon became clear that the second coming of stalk and slash wasn’t going to have quite the same longevity as it’s first go round. Part of the reason for this was that Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s seminal slice and dice basically spent most of its time dissecting and deconstructing the sub-genre in a way that kind of meant that it would be virtually impossible to take them fully seriously unless some major evolution was to take place.
While you could argue that changes did indeed eventually occur with the likes of Ti West’s X and Damian Leone’s back to basics Terrifier trilogy, back in the late nineties we got stuff like I Still Know What You Did Last Summer which ironically seemed to counter-programmed to ignore everything that made Scream so innovative. However, just because a slasher movie is too dumb to change its ways in the face of change, does this mean that a goofy offering of blood and bikinis still can’t entertain – even for the wrong reasons?

A year has passed since Julie James survived the murderous spree of Ben Willis, a vengeful fisherman who targeted a quartet of teens for nailing him with their car during a drunken celebration the year prior to that. However, while this immediately renders the title inaccurate (surely it should read as I Still Know What You Did The Summer Before Last), the more pressing concern is that it’s left the traumatised student suffering PTSD episodes where she has visions of the deranged fisherman coming at her brandishing his razor sharp hook. This has led to it affecting her long distance relationship with nice-but-dim fisherman himbo Ray Bronson who can’t quite seem to understand that his girlfriend doesn’t want to return to the town where both their friends were slaughtered and they themselves where nearly fish bait for the slicker wearing killer.
However, after her roommate, Karla, wins a radio competition that nabs them four sweet tickets to a holiday in Barbados and deciding they all need a break, Karla invites her boyfriend, Tyrell while she urges Julie to invite the interested Will when Ray is a no-show. However, unbeknownst to Julie, the reason her blank-faced boy toy never turned up is that he was attacks by a disturbingly familiar figure dressed as a fisherman who wields a hook as expertly as a surgeon uses a scalpel.
With Ray temporarily out of commission with a head injury, Julie attempts to enjoy her tropical vacation, but that’s fairly hard to do when you realise that your prize holiday starts on the first day of off season and the resort is all but abandoned except for barely five members of staff. Worse yet, a massive storm us about to hit and before she knows it, Julie and her friends have found themselves ensnared in a weirdly elaborate trap by the still vengeful Ben Willis. But as a wounded Ray attempts to make a trip to Barbados to save the day, Julie finds that it’s not only Willis in his fisherman getup she has to worry about.

To say that I Still Know What You Did Last Summer has gotten some bad press is something of an understatement, and to be fair, it’s fairly warranted as its as blunt and dumb as a slasher movie has ever gotten. On the other hand, 7% on Rotten Tomatoes is a pretty harsh mark to give any film that manages to maintain the basic parameters of filmmaking and tell a coherent story and for a mark that low I’d expect a movie a lot more wretched than this. OK, so it’s a notable step down from its meat and potatoes predecessor that, in the face of Scream’s radical nature, was a fairly restrained thriller that only truly leant on its slasher tropes during its screamy and runny final third, but the first film could generously be described as reliably solid at best.
But obviously that’s not what the producers wanted an as a result, ISKWYDLS proves to scrape from the bottom of the slasher barrel to indulge in some of the genre’s most dated habits. I mean, it’s flashy and all and the jump to a holiday resort in Barbados may be a jump from a sleepy fishing town in North Carolina, but it flashy enough and provides a good reason to have a storm kick the shit out of the setting during the climax. However, to get the main characters there requires our leads to be nothing short of complete and utter morons which is noticably strange seeing as the first film tried to establish Love Hewitt’s Julie James as something of a thinker. However, the only real arc the actress has to work with here is that her character graduates from wearing a push up bra under a white tank top to full bikinis and not much else. Director Danny Cannon still must of been reeling from the reaction of his much lamented, 1995 Judge Dredd adaptation and as such, he seems to be desperately trying to get out of directors jail by using the sight of Jennifer Love Hewitt in a bikini as a lockpick, but alas it wasn’t meant to be.

However, as idiotic as the film can often be, a lot of it is so badly put together, I actually couldn’t help but be magnificently entertained for all the wrong reasons and the sillier it got, the more I warming up to it. After all, name me another slasher antagonist who would go to the unfathomable lengths of organising a tropical holiday for his busty nemesis to claim his belated revenge – and more to the point, how does a thought dead, one-handed fisherman pay for four tickets? Furthermore, neither Julie or Karla actually get their radio question right (Brazilia is the capital of Brazil kids, not Rio), but never actually think to double check their answers or look up what the weather is going to be like when they get there – which is shockingly slapdash for a person who has already survived one strangely complicated murder attempt. Furthermore, Freddie Prince Jr.’s Ray – who still talks like an infant due to a condition I will now dub Ray-tarded – has virtually nothing to do with the main story and is stuck in a little sub-movie all of his own that seemingly sees him travel to Barbados in like, a day despite having zero funds and a hefty concussion.
The bizarre plot choices come thick and fast and it manages to peak by including one of the most random-ass, grab bag of supporting characters I’ve seen who all seem to have wandered in from other movies. Jennifer Esposito shows up as a sardonic bartender; Bill Cobbs is a porter with a baffling side line in voodoo for some reason; Jeffrey Combs collects his paycheck as a moody hotel manager with a set of piano key teeth in his puss and most famously of all, an uncredited Jack Black unanimously wins the 1998 Oscar for Most Punchable Stoned White Guy With Dreadlocks in a fucking landside to the point where I found myself breathing an audible sigh of relief when he catches a hook in the sternum.

Yes, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is about as stupid as an oxygen starved panda, but if you’re armed with as much savvy of slasher cinema knowhow as your average Scream character, there’s a good chance that this sequel will provide enough unintentional laughs to be entertaining in all the wrong ways – but it’s just as amusing that that only after two years after it’s comeback, the slasher film was already starting to eat itself alive like a starving cannibal. Slasher? I hardly knew her.
🌟🌟