By Chris Jackson
Arizona Daily Wildcat
October 21, 1997

Check your brain at the door, it's another slasher movie

Photo courtesy Mandalay Entertainment Arizona Daily Wildcat Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.), Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Barry (Ryan Phillippe) realize that someone knows their terrible secret in "I Know What You Did Last Summer."

Trends come and go in Hollywood.

Back in the '80s, studios churned out horror movies by the dozens. Most were forgettable, a few were just so dumb they wound up being funny and then the genre fizzled out.

Then last year, along comes "Scream," a movie that spoofed all of those cheesy '80s horror films. Unfortunately, Kevin Williamson, who wrote "Scream," must have decided that people wanted to see more of those dumb horror movies he had just mocked.

The film "I Know What You Did Last Summer," also written by Williamson, is the first of the new wave of horror flicks.

I do admit, the premise of "Summer" is interesting: four teen-agers in a car run over some poor guy, then they dump his body in the ocean and promise not to talk about it ever again. The psychological impact that this would have on anyone is a fascinating idea to explore.

The filmmakers, though, toss this out the window in exchange for turning the movie into just another teen-agers-running-from-psycho-masked-killer flick, sorely lacking in originality and any of the dry witticisms of "Scream."

"Summer" winds up being one long, dull movie with few surprises, a terribly predictable ending and some moments of stupidity that made me sick to my stomach.

All of this is a huge disappointment, since the actors in the film, unlike all those no-names who were in the '80s flicks, are pretty good.

Jennifer Love Hewitt, from TV's "Party of Five," and Sarah Michelle Gellar, from "Buffy The Vampire Slayer," are two pretty good actresses. The two guys, Eddie Prinze Jr. and Ryan Philippe, are decent, even though I've never seen or heard of them before.

The reason the two women are in this film, though, seems to be to run around, scream, trip, fall, go the wrong way, check out strange noises and generally show off their cleavage.

Not that there's anything wrong with that last bit (pardon my sexist male attitude), but it gets tiresome after a while to watch these two seem to forget to think before they act.

There's little mystery in who the killer is or why he's after them and at least one character's death scene is so drawn out that I was yawning by the time that character finally bought it.

Williamson seems to have missed the point of his previous film.

Remember the bit where Neve Campbell told the killer on the phone why she hated horror movies? "It's always starring some big-breasted girls who can't act who are always running up the stairs instead of going out the front door. It's insulting."

She just described this movie.

What the filmmakers should have done was not focus on the killer, but have each of the characters begin to question if they're going nuts or not. There's never a question as to whether or not the killer exists. It could have been a lot more interesting and it could have given the actors a lot of room to show off the fact that they can act.

Judging by the crowd at the theater, though, Williamson may have written the right script after all, considering that it consisted in large part of high school students and pre-teens whose idea of an intellectual film is "Men In Black." Still, for those people who understood the subtle humor in "Scream," Williamson's second effort is a major disappointment.