Three Films Know What You Did Last Summer

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997): Unlike its contemporary Kevin Williamson-scripted Scream, this adaptation of a Lois Duncan YA novel really didn’t want to be all clever and funny in its combination of slasher and giallo tropes. Instead, this is all about sexy people shot sexily, chases that take their time to stop being bloodless, and slick youth market filmmaking in a late 90s style.

Being the kind of guy that I am, really prefer this approach to the Scream way of doing things. This one’s all about big, loud, fun. In this, it is much closer to the spirit of the classic slasher, or rather, the perfect studio update to the formula. Sure, half the cast can’t act their way out of a wet paper bag (to be fair, most of them got better over the years), the plot makes very little sense, and the killer has even greater superpowers than Jason Voorhees, but there’s such a lack of pretension here, I’m bound to have fun with this one even when I’m not falling into 90s nostalgia (which I won’t anyhow).

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998): Danny Cannon’s sequel is ridiculous in all the right ways, even slicker, potentially sexier and most certainly quite a bit bloodier, and features the sort of plot that falls to pieces when one applies even the slightest bit of logic to it. It also, following a sad cue from the first film in the series, appears to be the start of the neo slasher’s inability to kill off main characters for fear of hindering franchise potential. Also features Jack Black as a rasta ganja dude OCR, which is a thing I’d rather not have had to witness or even just contemplate.

I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025): Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s legacy sequel is often much more of a comedy than the first two films, and spends just as much time on the supposedly charming girlfriends pair of Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders as it does on murder and mayhem. Whenever the film gets around to being a slasher legacy sequel of fun chases and awesome violence, it is great fun, and focussing on character relations could actually induce a viewer to care about what happens to them – a trick the first movies never managed with me. Of course, for this, you also need to forget the reason why the killer is after these assholes. But then, I’m rather sure the script does exactly that about halfway through.

Some fans of the originals apparently aren’t too fond of the way the film treats Jennifer Love Hewitt’s and Freddie Prinze Jr.’s characters (both of whom have really improved as actors in the ensuing decades, as I promised above), but for that, you probably need to have given a shit about them in the first place.

Otherwise, this is a fine example of mainstream legacy horror and all of its strengths and weaknesses.

In short: Venom (2005)

The young population of the appropriately named Louisiana swamp town of Backwater is under attack, for an accident involving a suitcase full of magical snakes has left the corpse of town outcast and gas station owner Ray (Rick Cramer) possessed by all the evil the local voodoo priestess milked out of people (don’t ask). That’s obviously a whole lot of evil, and so Zombie Ray first kills the coroner, then Method Man, and then starts on the town’s young.

Will obvious final girl Eden (Agnes Bruckner) manage to save some of her friends from certain doom? And how will she get rid of a tow truck driving zombie?

Despite appearances, Jim Gillespie’s throwback to the supernatural slasher stylings of the 80s is a rather fun little flick. As it goes with its particular subgenre, it’s not a terrible clever film, but at least it is not the kind of film where the bad guy is dispatched by a kung fu kicking Bustah Rhymes. Instead the film takes its own silliness seriously and expects the audience to roll with it.

That’s not particularly difficult, for there’s quite a bit to recommend here. For one, the film puts in a decent effort to portray its Louisiana dead end town as a place, if the kind of place where only our young murder victims, Ray, a sheriff and deputy, a coroner and a mother seem to live. It’s not exactly a naturalistic approach, but the film does have quite a few atmospheric shots of swamps and the always empty (apart from the diner) town, driving home that this isn’t a generic backwater, but indeed much more specific Backwater.

It also puts a bit of effort into giving its meat broad stroke character traits and conflicts slightly above and beyond the question of who sleeps with whom. It’s not deep, but it’s deep enough to make most of the characters feel a bit less disposable, even though I have a hard time imagining anyone being crushed by anyone’s death.
These deaths aren’t half bad either, realized with decent practical effects and a good eye for the slightly gruesome (it’s mainstream horror and not a gore movie after all) and embedded in just as decent slash and stalk scenes.

The longer Venom goes on, the larger its sillier vein becomes, and once we enter the final third, bets are off enough that a completely straight-faced scene where the more survivable of our protagonists use the dead body of one of their friends as an oversized voodoo doll with an assorted discussion about the morality of such a thing is just par for the course. I’m not complaining, mind you, because I do prefer imaginative nonsense played straight to the alternatives of unimaginative nonsense or awkward irony, or worse, a combination of both.

So, while Venom certainly isn’t an overlooked classic, it is a good-sized chunk of effective, slightly crazy fun, just the thing to watch when you’re not up for something more involving.