I Still Know What You Did Last Summer

[StevePulaski]

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)
Directed by: Danny Cannon

Jennifer Love Hewitt, Brandy, Mekhi Phifer, and Matthew Settle in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.

Rating: ★½

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is the sequel you get when a film does surprisingly well at the box office during the Halloween season the previous year and half the cast was killed off in the previous one. Released barely a year after I Know What You Did Last Summer, but just late enough to miss the appropriate window of October entirely, this is a borderline indefensible cash-in built on a shaky foundation that relies on brand familiarity and little else.

I've seen a plethora of slashers in my day. I've never seen one so lazy as to resurrect its (human) killer through inexcusable means and kickstart a murder-plot by having the subjects win a staged radio contest in order to fly them out to the Bahamas and make them pawns in a cat-and-mouse game. That's where we're at with I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. This time, however, the surviving Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) remain the only two directly involved with the events of Fourth of July 1996. The two are dating, but while Julie is off taking summer classes, Ray continues his work as a deckhand. Julie and her roommate Karla (Brandy) receive the aforementioned phone-call from a radio station that sends the two of them plus Tyrell (Mekhi Phifer), Karla's boyfriend, and their mutual friend Will (Matthew Settle) in place of Ray, to a tropical paradise where they can relax.

Of course, that doesn't go as planned, as Ben Wills (Muse Watson), the man who stalked Julie and her friends last summer, rears his head again with the same ominous notes. Making matters more hasty is the lack of transportation off the island due to a raging hurricane brewing just off the coast, bringing heavy rainfall and no electricity.

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer retains the soap opera-slickness of its predecessor and the same reliance on jump-scares and teases as the primary methods of shock. The problem with a sequel to a concept like this is it turns the antagonist into an omnipotent, indestructible monster as opposed to the human being he is. On top of nagging familiarity with the formula, the absence of director Jim Gillespie and screenwriter Kevin Williamson is felt in the film's inclusion of insignificant side-characters, a higher body count, and less grace in its ability to handle the leads' ongoing trauma. Instead, we get flimsy comic relief in the form of Jack Black playing a character for which he's far too esteemed.

New additions to the cast in the form of R&B singer Brandy and the dashing Mekhi Phifer provide eye-candy but little else. Where I Know What You Did Last Summer took its time in gradually building the characters, as one-dimensional as they all ultimately were, Danny Cannon's sequel feels in a haste to keep things under 90 minutes. From a lackluster concept to an unremarkable cast of new faces, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is a fantastic example of a needless, uninspired follow-up to what would become a staple horror film of the 1990s.

NOTE: My review of I Know What You Did Last Summer: stevethemovieman.proboards.com/thread/6559/last-summer

Starring: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Brandy, Mekhi Phifer, Matthew Settle, Freddie Prinze, Jr, Muse Watson, Jeffrey Combs, and Jack Black. Directed by: Danny Cannon.