Unlike last summer, you won't get hooked.

"I Still Know What You Did Last Summer"
Overall Rating: **

Not all sequels are bad. The last two thirds of the "Star Wars" trilogy were almost up to the original, some of the later Bond films were easily better than their predecessors, and I'm still undecided on how "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" compares with "Raiders of the Lost Ark." On the other hand, the good sequels are given a bad name by the ones which fall far short of their prequels. For instance, "The Lost World" was a poor excuse to put people in front of dinosaurs again, "Speed 2" simply replaced the bus with a ship, and then there was "Ghostbusters 2," which I remember as simply being old characters with new ghosts. "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" falls into this latter category.

The movie opens with Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewett) going to confession--only to find that it isn't a priest she's confessing to, but our old friend, the psychotic Ben Willis (Muse Watson). Are we worried? No--she isn't killed two minutes into the movie; before he can kill her, she wakes up--screaming in the middle of political science class. Later that day, Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.) shows up, and invites her back to Southport. She declines, saying she's not ready to go back. But Ray isn't the only person who cares about her--her roommate and best friend Karla (Brandy) tries to get her out of her shell by dragging her to a club and fixing her up with Will Benson (Matthew Settle). But, alas, even there, she's haunted by the man in the slicker, and must go home.

So, when Karla wins a trip to the Bahamas by guessing the capital of Brazil on a radio contest, this seems the perfect chance to cheer up Julie. Julie invites Ray, but he hesitates. In the end, when he can't make it, Karla invites Will for her. The three of them and Karla's boyfriend (Mekhi Phifer) arrive at the isolated tropical resort--just in time to meet up with Julie's nemesis.

Many elements of the film are OK, but not great. Jennifer Love Hewett and Brandy are both good enough for their roles; but their roles don't require much more than looking attractive, running, and screaming at the appropriate moments, so this doesn't really mean much. While there are a few places where it's effective, the use of music to build suspense is mostly cliché; loud music that sounds like a sample from Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" doesn't add much overall. The cinematography could also be described as a zero sum. On the one side, even though most of the film takes place in the dark, there are very few scenes where it's hard to see what's going on--this means the film avoids a vice that many modern films are guilty of. On the other side, the movie is not really memorable visually--the shots are all perfectly adequate, but nothing is really dazzling in any way.

The plot, such as it is, is handled moderately well. The audience gets a good hint--missed by the characters--that something is fishy with the vacation: the capital of Brazil isn't Rio, after all. The film also has a few surprises. Still, the movie is also predictable in many places. There is more than one scene where you know that so-and-so is going to die in a minute--with some characters, you can see it coming when you meet them. I don't think anyone doubted, either, that Ben Willis was alive and psychopathic as ever, and that Julie wasn't delusional. There were two relatively minor plot holes. How did Ben Willis survive his ordeal in the first film? We're left with the implication is that he's a better swimmer than Mark Spitz; but then, the first film implies that anyway. To talk about the other one would spoil something in the movie--to put it broadly, a character who seemed to be helpful earlier turns violent, with a fairly weak explanation of why.

But the plot's biggest problem wasn't holes or predictability; the plot was simply too thin: Julie is still stalked by Ben Willis, and has to watch friends and acquaintances die around her--all over again. If they simply dragged "I Know What You Did Last Summer" on for another two hours without changing anything else, the effect would have been the same. In the first movie, we saw some people killed with cargo hooks. In "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer," we see even more people get killed with cargo hooks--and that's it. It gets old very quickly, and in the end, the film is empty.

"I Know What You Did Last Summer" was an intriguing thriller: four kids commit a serious crime, and are terrorized by an unknown witness in punishment or revenge. "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" is a superficial sequel. It has plenty of action that is like the original, but misses everything that made the original a good movie.

Title: "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer"
Release date: November 14, 1998

MPAA rating:R
Overall rating: **
Aprox. run time: 100 min.

Director: Danny Cannon
Writers: Trey Callaway (story and screenwriter), Stephen Gaghan
Stars: Jennifer Love Hewett, Brandy

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Mansion/7045/StilKnow.htm
Added to blog site: 7/28/09 (with minor editing)