The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 8-14
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
Directed by Jim Gillespie
The teen slasher takes its iconic title and basic premise from Lois Duncan’s 1973 young-adult thriller, but the similarities end there. Her twist ending would be impossible to adapt well to a visual medium, so 90s It Writer Kevin Williamson riffs instead on the urban legend of The Hook—in which promiscuous teens are targeted by a Barrie-esque murderer. His script doesn’t quite contain his usual complex genre-metacommentary, familiar from Scream, the first season of Dawson’s Creek or even Cursed, but it does have its moments. Jennifer Love Hewitt, checking off every now-outdated fashion from the decade, takes the role of the Williamsonian cultural critic, calling out misogyny in contemporary teen movies and foundational American folktales—but always with a smile, so it lands more easily (or, you know, can be easily ignored by the people it’s meant for).
She’s one of a quartet of popular, good-looking high-school seniors (also including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze, Jr., and Ryan Phillippe, 90s Royalty All) unaware of their privilege when they accidentally run over a guy on a twisty, deserted road and cover it up. (“The cops will never believe us!” Uh, ok. Gellar just won the town beauty pageant!) A year later, they’re tormented by a hook-for-a-hand killer in their North Carolina town, who reveals knowledge of their sworn-secret with terse notes from which the titles derives. Williamson half-heartedly passes this off as the sort of plausible story on which legends like The Hook are based. More so, he delivers a teen-idol- and set-piece-driven mystery that also acknowledges the melancholy running through so many post-high school experiences: the friends unkept, dreams unrealized, hope surrendered.
Director Gillespie’s central contribution seems to be one of scale: I Know What You Did evokes a recent past that now seems impossible, when horror movies were expensive studio affairs with crane and helicopter shots and original full-orchestra scores; the lengthy finale is a complexly choreographed, absurdly expensive swashbuckling battle on a fishing boat (again evoking Peter Pan). These were the Clinton Years, when everyone had money to toss around, even Hollywood—when the Internet had made everyone rich, hurting no one but the major record labels. Two years later, The Blair Witch Project would reveal a low-investment, high-return alternative; its example would be enthusiastically embraced later, in the leaner, late-Bush years, reducing movies such as this one to a gawkable time capsule. Henry Stewart (February 10, 11, midnight at the Nitehawk)