I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (Blu-ray)

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Help me out here. I'm trying to figure out why the slasher genre exists. And don't say it's because people like a good scare now and then. For that, you could go on a roller coaster, listen to a police scanner, or catch your wife or girlfriend in a mud mask. You don't need a zombie fisherman wearing a slicker and rain cap--a guy with a hook who terrorizes chickens of the sea, which is what we get in this tired sequel.

"I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" (1998) must have been inspired by an old pirate movie, with a light bulb going off when writer Trey Callaway heard the captain growl, ARRRRR, I'll slit your gizzard! Yeah, well, graphic slitting of gizzards and other bodily parts doesn't scare me--it just makes me go euwwww. Then again, in a genre like this it's the possibility of gizzard-slitting that's supposed to scare you. But slasher tropes are trotted out with such unimaginative regularity and predictability in this follow-up to "I Know What You Did Last Summer" (1997) that it's not even fun playing the attrition game and guessing who's going to die first, next, or last.

There are like two legitimately surprising moments in this film, and for a teen slasher movie it's surprisingly tame. The closest thing you get to sex occurs when Jennifer Love Hewitt lies in her hotel room listening to the sound of a squeaking bed and orgasmic shouts on the other side of the wall. Then we have a quick cut to the other room, where her friend is using the bed like a trampoline, fully clothed and jumping up and down astraddle her male friend, who's also fully clothed. It's a gag, sure, but it's also a cheap trick . . . and a metaphor for the way this movie operates. These filmmakers get bait-and-switch all right, but they don't seem to grasp the concept of red herrings. Any attempts to get us to think one way when the plot really goes another just wiggle limply on the end of the line. You feel more "had" than hooked. Hewitt fans will probably enjoy her always-showcased cleavage and the sashaying she does in bath towel and PJs, and fans of Jack Black may find his uncredited appearance as a stoner amusing. But this limp thriller was dead before the slasher even screwed on his hook.

Somebody forgot to tell the filmmakers that "sequel" doesn't mean "same." The unimaginative nonsense begins when they set this film on the same weekend as the first--the Fourth of July. The original film involved four teens partying on a beach and talking about a local legend involving a fisherman with a hook who preys on teen couples. Driving home drunk, they hit somebody walking in the road and dump his body into the sea. Later, the note comes: "I know what you did last summer," and shortly thereafter the terror begins.

In the sequel, Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. return as Julie and Ray, joined this time by Julie's best friend Karla (Brandy Norwood) and her boyfriend Tyrell (Mekhi Phifer). Thrown into the mix is a fifth teen--Will (Matthew Settle)--, a blind date of sorts who wants to get cozy with Julie. The premise is pretty timeworn. Get these kids to a spooky location, isolate them, and pick them (and others) off as if they were ducks in a shooting gallery. Throw in the unfulfilled promise of sex, and a killer who moves like a phantom and you've pretty much described a dozen films. But here, the spooky location is a Bahamian resort.