We meet her friends: Her obnoxious rich boyfriend Barry (Ryan Phillippe), her brainy best friend Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), and Julie’s boyfriend Ray (Freddie Prinze, Jr.). Barry is a jerk who likes to get in fights and drive while drunk (“Can you say ‘alcoholic’?” Julie asks him). They build a bonfire on the beach and debate the old urban legend about the teenage couple who found the bloody hook embedded in their car door. And then, on the way home, they strike a shadowy figure walking in the road.
In a panic, they dump him into the sea, even though he is not quite dead at the time. They’re afraid to go to the police and risk reckless manslaughter charges. (“This is your future, Julie,” Barry screams at her.) Helen then goes off to New York for her showbiz career, and Julie heads for college, but by the next summer they’re back home again, pale, chastened, and racked by guilt.
That’s when one of them gets a note that says, “I know what you did last summer.” As they panic and try to find out who sent it—who knows what they did—the movie loses what marginal tension it has developed, and unwinds in a tedious series of obligatory scenes in which nonessential characters are murdered with a bloody hook wielded by The Fisherman, a macabre figure in a long slicker and a rubber rain hat.
“This is a fishing village,” one of the friends says. “Everybody has a slicker.” Yes, but not everybody wears it ashore, along with the hat, during steamy July weather. Only The Fisherman does. And since the movie doesn’t play fair with its Fisherman clues, we’re left with one of those infuriating endings in which (danger! plot spoiler ahead!) the murders were committed by none of the above.
The ads make much of the fact that I Know What You Did Last Summer is from “the creators of Scream.” That means both scripts are by Kevin Williamson. My bet is that he hauled this one out of the bottom drawer after Scream passed the $100 million mark. The neat thing about Scream was that the characters had seen a lot of horror films, were familiar with all the conventions, and knew they were in a horror-type situation. In I Know, there’s one moment like that (as the two women approached an ominous house, they observe ominously, “Jodie Foster tried this . . .”). But for the rest of the movie they’re blissfully unaware of the dangers of running upstairs when pursued, walking around at night alone, trying to investigate the situation themselves, going onto seemingly empty fishing boats, etc.
After the screening was over and the lights went up, I observed a couple of my colleagues in deep and earnest conversation, trying to resolve twists in the plot. They were applying more thought to the movie than the makers did. A critic’s mind is a terrible thing to waste.
I Spit on Your Grave
(Directed by Meir Zarchi; starring Camille Keaton, Eron Tabor; 1980)
I Spit on Your Grave is sick, reprehensible, and contemptible. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life. This is a film without a shred of artistic distinction. It lacks even simple craftsmanship. There is no possible motive for exhibiting it, other than the totally cynical hope that it might make money. Perhaps it will make money: When I saw it on a Monday morning, the theater contained a larger crowd than usual.
It was not just a large crowd, it was a profoundly disturbing one. I do not often attribute motives to audience members, nor do I try to read their minds, but the people who were sitting around me on Monday morning made it easy for me to know what they were thinking. They talked out loud. And if they seriously believed the things they were saying, they were vicarious sex criminals.
The story of I Spit on Your Grave is told with moronic simplicity. A girl goes for a vacation in the woods. She sunbathes by a river. Two men speed by in a powerboat. They harass her. Later, they tow her boat to a rendezvous with two of their buddies. They strip the girl, beat her, and rape her. She escapes into the woods. They find her, beat her, and rape her again. She crawls home. They are already there, beat her some more, and rape her again.
Two weeks later, somewhat recovered, the girl lures one of the men out to her house, pretends to seduce him, and hangs him. She lures out another man and castrates him, leaving him to bleed to death in a bathtub. She kills the third man with an ax and disembowels the fourth with an outboard engine. End of movie.
These horrible events are shown with an absolute minimum of dialogue, which is so poorly recorded that it often cannot be heard. There is no attempt to develop the personalities of the characters—they are, simply, a girl and four men, one of them mentally retarded. The movie is nothing more or less than a series of attacks on the girl and then her attacks on the men, interrupted only by an unbelievably grotesque and inappropriate scene in which she enters a church and asks forgiveness for the murders she plans to commit.
How did the audience react to all of this? Those who were vocal seemed to be eating it up. The middle-aged, white-haired man two seats down from me, for example, talked aloud. After the first rape: “That was a good one!” After the second: “That’ll show her!” After the third: “I’ve seen some good ones, but this is the best.” When the tables turned and the woman started her killing spree, a woman in the back row shouted: “Cut him up, sister!” In several scenes, the other three men tried to force the retarded man to attack the girl. This inspired a lot of laughter and encouragement from the audience.
I wanted to turn to the man near me and tell him his remarks were disgusting, but I did not. To hold his opinions at his age, he must already have suffered a fundamental loss of decent human feelings. I would have liked to talk with the woman in the back row, the one with the feminist solidarity for the movie’s heroine. I wanted to ask if she’d been appalled by the movie’s hour of rape scenes. As it was, at the film’s end I walked out of the theater quickly, feeling unclean, ashamed, and depressed.
This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures. Because it is made artlessly, it flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering. As a critic, I have never condemned the use of violence in films if I felt the filmmakers had an artistic reason for employing it. I Spit on Your Grave does not. It is a geek show. I wonder if its exhibitors saw it before they decided to play it, and if they felt as unclean afterward as I did.
In Dreams
(Directed by Neil Jordan; starring Annette Bening, Aidan Quinn; 1999)
In Dreams is the silliest thriller in many a moon, and the only one in which the heroine is endangered by apples. She also survives three falls from very high places (two into a lake, one onto apples), escapes from a hospital and a madhouse, has the most clever dog since Lassie, and causes a traffic pile-up involving a truck and a dozen cars. With that much plot, does this movie really need the drowned ghost town, the husband’s affair with an Australian woman, the flashbacks to the dominatrix mom, and the garbage disposal that spews apple juice?
All of this goofiness is delivered with style and care by a first-rate team; this is a well-made bad movie. The heroine, named Claire, is portrayed by Annette Bening as a woman in torment. She begins to dream of horrible things, and realizes an evil killer is causing her nightmares (“He’s inside my head!”). Her husband (Aidan Quinn) goes to the cops with her premonitions, but gets the brush-off. A frequent dream involves harm to a child; it turns out to be her own.