I Know What You Did Last Summer

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson follows up Scream with a script that's not as wink-wink, nudge-nudge as last year's collaboration with Wes Craven, but one that still assumes audiences -- and the film's characters -- have seen all this crap before. I Know What You Did Last Summer, directed by Jim Gillespie, is also quite creepy, thanks to a plot that could conceivably happen to any American adolescent. Four teens (including Party of Five's Jennifer Love Hewitt as college-bound Julie and Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- the TV show, not the opera -- star Sarah Michelle Gellar as town beauty queen Helen) accidentally run over a man and then throw the victim into the ocean. When Julie returns home the following summer, she finds that a mysterious someone dressed in a black fisherman's slicker is out to seek revenge.

The ending doesn't approach Scream's level of perversity. Neither does Last Summer benefit from references to past horror flicks. But it would have been a mistake to cover this once-funny ground again and create a Scream 2 (which is coming out soon). Instead, the humor here more generally and more sporadically mocks the genre -- like Julie sarcastically telling her beau, "I feel your pain." At the Cheri, the Fresh Pond, and the Circle and in the suburbs.

-- Mark Bazer