I KNOW WHAT YOU (DIDDLY?) DID LAST SUMMER. (1997) BASED ON THE BOOK OF THE SAME NAME BY LOIS DUNCAN. DIRECTED BY JIM GILLESPIE.
STARRING JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT, SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR, FREDDIE PRINZE JR., RYAN PHILIPPE, JOHNNY GALECKI, BRIDGETTE WILSON, MUSE WATSON AND ANNE HECHE.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
This is a rather enjoyable slice of 'Nineties nostalgia that I actually only properly watched for the first time this August Bank Holiday weekend, believe it or not. I've seen something called I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER which I think was a sequel, and of course my most beloved cartoon family THE SIMPSONS have parodied the original film brilliantly in one of their TREEHOUSE OF HORROR spooky Halloween episodes.
In I KNOW WHAT YOU DIDDLY-DID, Homer's enemy and God-bothering next-door-neighbourino Ned Flanders is out for his nightly power-walk when he is accidentally run over by the Simpson family car. Yeah, 'accidentally,' Homer. Sure ya diddly-did...!
Anyway, IKWYDLS is peopled with 'Nineties acting royalty, so to speak, and has a great gripping plot until everything somehow starts to fall apart at the end. The ending seemed unnecessarily complicated to me, or maybe I just plain didn't follow it, which is always possible. I'm notorious for having to have the endings of films explained to me.
Four teenagers from a small-ish 'Murican fishing-town are celebrating- with gusto- their final summer before going their separate ways, off to college and onto glittering careers and world travel and suchlike. All the usual things that teenagers think they're gonna do with their lives until the arrival of kids and mortgages and crippling responsibilities herald the death knell for their carefree youths, heh-heh-heh.
Happened to me, happens to us all. It'll happen to you too, dear delightfully unencumbered reader, reading this in bed with a lover and a cappucino from the expensive coffee place down the street on a lazy Sunday afternoon. You think it won't but it will, mwah-hahahahahaha...!
Any-hoo, the four teens are drunk off their faces as they drive home carelessly from their private beach party, at which the scrawny scrag-end known as Jennifer Love Hewitt loses her virginity to Nice Guy Ray, played by Freddie Prinze Jr.
He's the guy who once played a sickly-sweet too-good-to-be-true 'Manny' to Ross Geller and Rachel Green's kiddie on popular 'Nineties sitcom FRIENDS. God, FRIENDS! Talk about being kicked in the nuts by dem 'Nineties feels.
An act of drunken stupidity by the utterly wanky sunglass-sporting rich kid Barry, played by Ryan Philippe, leads to the teens running over a guy in a hit-and-run accident that quite literally returns to haunt them. They tip his body in the ocean so that their glittering futures don't all come to a sudden stop due to the icky inconvenience of murder convictions all round.
A year later, their futures aren't exactly so bright they gotta wear shades to protect 'em from the glare. Jennifer Love Hewitt looks like a broom-handle with hair now, what with the worry of what they've done hanging over her for her entire first year of college, which was a total wash.
Ryan Philippe's character Barry is wankier than ever, still wearing rich-kid sunglasses and going round threatening to punch everyones' asses in with the feeling of entitlement that comes with privilege. He's such a dick, haha. Freddie Prinze Jr., the nice guy, is working as a fisherman, which seems to be what he wanted to do all along, so good for him.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is working in her father's store. Seems like going to New York didn't really work out for her character Helen, whose boss at the store is her bitch of a sister who really seems to hate her younger sibling and is definitely jealous of her.
As if all this failure and moping about feeling sorry for themselves isn't bad enough,
Scraggy Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) has gotten an anonymous letter with just seven little words written on it in big bold black print: 'I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER...' Enter the Big Bad Man in the rain slicker...
Anne Heche, co-star with Sandra Oh of a truly appalling movie called CATFIGHT that came out earlier this year, is pretty good as Missy Egan, the edgy, maybe not-quite-all-there sister of the supposedly dead man.
I say supposedly because, by the end of the film, I was thoroughly confused as to who exactly was supposed to have done what to whom. Johnny Galecki (THE BIG BANG THEORY) showed some promise as the weird loner Max but his part sadly never really got off the ground.
The real stars of the show were pageant queen Buffy's and Scraggy's lovely white 'Nineties boobies, which were pictured falling artlessly out of their not-very-confining confines right throughout the movie. The down-tops-and-blouses camera was working very well here too, much to the delight of the male viewers, I'd say...!
IKWYDLS is a cracking good bit of fun and a nice cheesy slice of 'Nineties nostalgia pizza into the bargain. You know what I liked best about it, though? It's got a great hook...!
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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