I Still Know What You Did Last Summer Review

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
One year on from the events of the first movie, and Julie James (Hewitt) has pulled herself together, and is attending college. Her roommate wins aholiday for four to the Bahamas, and the pair bring their partners. It's not long though, before the disgruntled fisherman / roadkill is sending her notes again, and the carnage begins.

by Darren Bignell |
Published on
Release Date:

07 May 1999

Running Time:

100 minutes

Certificate:

18

Original Title:

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer

Sex, school and slashers. Copulation, classmates and corpuscles (all over the place). Whatever your alliterative group of choice, these ingredients are currently big business - everything's a franchise. So it is that despite I Know What You Did Last Summer's final frame "twist" - which suggested rather strongly than Jennifer Love Hewitt was sushi - she, and we, return for round two.

To recap then: in the first sortie, miffed mariner Ben Willis (Muse Watson) used a cunning combo of spooky notes and razor-sharp Captain Hook attachments to put the wind up four drunken high-schoolers who'd bashed him with their beamer and pitched him into the briny 12 months earlier. Ryan Philippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar (presumably before she honed vampire-slaying skills) bought it, so only Hewitt and Prinze Jr. make it back for the sequel. There has, however, been little progress. He's still hauling fish in Seahaven; she's still at college and nervy as hell. And although it's been a year since Ben apparently slept with the fishes for good, someone still has the gen on their exploits, and seems set on giving Jennifer the willies.

And so it all begins again. Oh, things may look new and fresh, as Julie (Hewitt) hooks up with new best pal Karla (Brandy), her horny beau Tyrell (Phifer) and caring, clean-cut Will (Matthew Settle) - who's offering more than a shoulder to cry on in place of Julie's absentee boyfriend Ray (Prinze Jr.) - on a not-so-dream holiday, but this is a standard, slice-and-dice re-run. And from the moment they arrive in a Bahamas paradise, the movie slant on natural selection rules: cast list gets chopped in reverse order with escalating nastiness.

Which is all watchably entertaining as far as it goes, but shadows/behind you/ slowly turning doorknob shocks seem worryingly reliant on an accident-prone string section, and apply one ounce of cerebrum (which you're not, of course, supposed to do), and upcoming twists become swiftly obvious.

The film, unfortunately, is never quite as witty as it should be, it cheats and creaks with reality in places and, though decent enough in the current climate, comes off poorly against its progenitor.
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