I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER

Director: Danny Cannon

Starring: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr, Brandy

Watching I Still Know What You Did Last Summer you’d think that Scream never happened. It takes a tired genre, and what was already a pretty overstretched premise, and takes it another step nearer being completely implausible. Or, as Mekhi Phifer’s character puts it: “It’s a long fucked up story, and you probably won’t believe a word of it anyway”. This time a bunch of nubile young things with “no nudity” clauses in their contracts, headed by Party of Five’s Jennifer Love Hewitt, are lured to an island in the Bahamas, just as the storm season breaks, where they are stalked by a man they thought they’d killed more than once. After about an hour where nothing much of note occurs, the film kicks into gear, but struggles to generate any real suspense, and fails to sustain enough momentum to impress. Cannon seems to have little idea how a horror film works, and seems content with throwing out one fake scare after another. Horror movie fans should, at least, be delighted with Re-Animator’s Jeffrey Combs, who has a sizeable cameo role as the hotel manager.

Columbia’s UK Region 2 disc presents the film to good effect, in 16:9-enhanced widescreen (2.35:1) ratio, and with an accomplished 5.1 sound mix. The disc also scores well when it comes to extra features: a six-minute “making of…” featurette (little more than the trailer woven together with vacuous soundbites) and a Hewitt music video, “How Do I Deal” (which has tenuous connection with the movie) are of little value, but one of the two trailers was especially-shot, and features a scene that’s not in the movie.