Review #347: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #20 - I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
Remember when Hollywood was like, REALLY interested in urban legends for a few years? You've got the movie Urban Legend (and its multiple sequels), you've got movies like Campfire Stories that explore them in anthology format, and even just a few years later you've got the TV show Supernatural, which started out basing each episode off of some urban legend and going from there. I Know What You Did Last Summer doesn't do a LOT with urban legends, but I'm pretty confident the story of the hook-handed killer was a huge inspiration for this movie (and it gets brought up multiple times in the film). What a time to be alive.
I Know... is a movie about a group of teens just out of high school, when a joyride through the hills turns tragic after they accidentally hit a pedestrian with their car. Rather than tell the authorities and take responsibility for their actions, they dump the body into the ocean and swear never to speak of the matter again- but a year later, they each start getting cryptic threats from an unseen figure who Knows What They Did Last Summer...
I obviously need to acknowledge that this film has been parodied and lampooned countless times, and it comprised a large part of the plot of both Scary Movie and Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th (the latter of which I have reviewed in the past). It certainly has a great inciting incident for the story, and overall I think this movie does some pretty good things with the premise (that the parody movies obviously didn't). I really like how we see the long(ish)-term ramifications of the characters having to live with this tragic secret, as we're shown in great detail how it's served to tear their friend group apart. I also like how the movie uses some of its runtime to explore the idea that the friends would naturally start to suspect each other as being the culprit, but I was disappointed that it didn't really go very far; there's two main times when it comes up in the story and both times it's over and done about one minute later. The movie is obviously trying to play up the mystery aspect of the plot, so I feel like they could have taken it just a bit further than they did.
But while the plot is generally pretty good, there's a LOT of silliness in here, most of which doesn't seem intentional. Jennifer Love Hewitt screaming "WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR" at the sky is hard to take seriously, and there are so many scenes that I simply can't watch without thinking of how Scary Movie parodied it (like when Sarah Michelle Gellar sees her boyfriend about to get killed while she's on stage so she screams for help- the equivalent scene in Scary Movie is just such a fantastic joke that it ruins any attempt at playing the scene straight). There's also some plot points I really don't understand- like, why did the killer kill Johnny Galecki's character? What did he have to do with anything? It would have made sense if the killer was trying to frame Ryan Phillippe's character- he had just been at the fishery threatening him with a hook, so when he turns up dead from hook-based violence it would look real (pardon the pun) fishy- but that's not at all what happens in the film. And for that matter, why did the killer NOT kill Ryan Phillippe the first time he had the chance? I really hoped all that would eventually make sense but it seems like these details either were forgotten, or maybe were remnants of an earlier draft of the script and/or some deleted scenes.
Also, I rarely bring up music in these reviews (the hallmark of a good soundtrack is that it doesn't really stand out, it just enhances the scene already playing) but this movie has a couple REALLY bad rock covers of classic songs in it (particularly, a cover of Summer Breeze over the opening credits, and later the cover of Hey Bulldog, were just plain terrible to listen to).
Overall this is a pretty fun movie, and I can see why it was so easily lampooned- EVERYONE watched this movie when it came out. It's not quite as shiny and new as it was in 1997, it's got some normal wear and tear, but I think it's still pretty good and I would recommend it to just about anyone.
Overall Rating: 8/10 Boots With No Foot In Them
Truth in Fiction: I'm just now learning for the first time that this movie was loosely adapted from a Young Adult novel by writer Lois Duncan. Lois was appalled by the decision to make her novel (which was a typical mystery, and was not particularly violent) into a slasher movie, because her own daughter was murdered by an unknown assailant in 1989. Her daughter's killer was eventually caught- but not until 2021, five years after Lois Duncan's death.
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