I don’t blame the late Lois Duncan for being upset over how her novel was changed from a young adult thriller into a slasher movie. But she still cashed the checks.
When the movie opened in the Fall of 1997, people in my dorm at Georgia Southern University thought it was a direct sequel to Scream, even though it had a different title and none of the actors that were in the first Scream. The only connection was a script written by Kevin Williamson who had also wrote that movie.
By 1997, the concept of the slasher movie had gone so dark, that calling any movie a “horror” in the 1990s was considered taboo. It’s been reported over the years that Williamson’s script was more of a psychological thriller of young teens being stalked by a person in a black rain slicker with a meat hook. Seeing how the movie is set in a coastal North Carolina town where fishing is one of the main industries, that’s like searching for women who are flashing their breast during Mardi Gras as if it’s a surprise.
The movie is mostly crap, but it’s done in such a way that it’s nice crap to watch for about 100 minutes when you just want to relax. The movie opens with four recent high school graduates having some fun on July 4 as they are young and think they will live forever. However, when Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) drives the car of his friend, Barry Cox (Ryan Phillipe), a wealthy person who has been drinking too much, they accidentally hit someone walking on the road.
Ray’s girlfriend, Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) believes they should notify authorities but her friend, Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who is the girlfriend of Barry goes along with his idea of getting rid of the body as they think he’s dead. Helen has dreams of becoming an actress in New York City. So they take the body down to the docks and put it in the waters but think they see him open his eyes.
They make a pact never to speak of it again. A year later, they’re rarely speaking to each other. Julie has sunk into depression at college, which in this case means, just styling her curly hair to straight hair and not wearing making. Seriously, when Julie’s token black roommate tells her it’s time to head home for the summer, you can just hear the “Dramatic Prairie Dog” music as Julie turns around.
Seriously, Hewett was like one of the hottest teen celebrities of the 1990s. (She still looks great in my opinion.) Does anyone really think she would look any different in a movie? She returns home only to find a letter in the mail reading, “I know what you did last summer.” Speaking of hair, the killer actually sneaks into Helen’s room at night and cuts her hair. Oh, no! Also, her and Barry have split up as Barry acts more like his surname and treats everyone like crap. So it’s obvious he is going to be the first one killed…eventually.
The killer actually comes close and is standing over Barry but does nothing. Alfred Hitchcock said that if you have a bomb under a desk that the audience knows it’s there, yet it doesn’t go off, it’s suspense. Having a killer that doesn’t really kill isn’t suspense, but just some guy in a rain slicker walking around a coastal town.
I think what happened was Williamson’s first draft was more faithful to Duncan’s novel as it involves Julie and Helen turning into Nancy Drew types as they try to determine if the pedestrian killed was a young man, David Egan (Jonathan Quint), who died at the same time. They try to get questions out of his sister, Missy (Anne Heche), who is a strange recluse, and could possibly be the Fisherman.
But principal photography began in the spring of 1997 with studio brass at Columbia TriStar demanding Williamson make it more slasher like as Scream was a sleeper hit and rising in popularity with young audiences. The first person The Fisherman kills is Max Neurick (Johnny Galecki), who has a crush on Julie and drove by them the year before as they tried to hide hitting the pedestrian. I also feel Max was supposed to play a bigger role as a red herring but they needed a bigger body count so he is killed off during the first half of the movie.
And there’s another moment when a character dies and it’s physically impossible how blood is spurted out on the glass. This was director Jim Gillespie’s first feature movie and I can understand how he must’ve thought as long as he said, “How high?” when the studio said, “Jump!” he’d get his foot in the door. Many directors helm low-budget horror/thriller movies before moving on to bigger and better things.
Unfortunately, that bigger thing was the Sylvester Stallone thriller D-Tox which infamous for its huge budget as Universal Pictures shelved it in post-production only to quietly sell it off to independent movie distributors where it was released under the title Eye See You. Gillespie’s career never recovered. But at least D-Tox had a nice twist as Stallone plays a FBI agent undergoing detox at a secluded facility in the Rocky Mountains with other law officers battling alcohol and substance abuse. Like The Thing, people didn’t know who they could trust.
Yet, D-Tox results to the Law of the Most Extraneous Character as Roger Ebert called it when the most minor or useless character is actually the killer. This movie doesn’t even have that, even though they keep Prinze off screen for a lot of time and point that he might be the Fisherman but it’s also a red herring.
The Killer is just someone who arrives in the final act. And I’ve always found this to be a cop-out on par with the “It was all just a dream.” The killer is actually Ben Willis (Muse Watson). And the ending sets up a sequel that actually was just a dream we find out in the sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer which is famous for Jack Black as a fat white Jamaican person. Also, if you didn’t already know, the capital of Brazil is Brasilia, not Rio de Janeiro.
The success of this along with the Scream movies ended up with a short resurgence of slasher movies with bigger name actors. There has been a legacy sequel with Hewitt and Prinze appearing in their roles. I haven’t seen it yet but it’s not the success this has been. I think it should be noted that Prinze and Gellar would go on later to appear as Fred and Daphne in the Scooby-Doo movies. And that’s what this movie
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 