We're supposed to be leaping into our neighbors' laps in fear - but once glance at the big ugly fisherman's hate and slicker and I'm guessing Ronald McDonald would have been a lot scarier. Even the killer's name is bland - Ben Willis - and more often than not he has a peculiar way of terrorizing his victims. Take for instance that lissome tulip Julie James. After helping her college chum Karla win a radio contest, the two arrive along with a couple of boys for a weekend getaway at a deserted Bahamas resort. In the middle of a monsoon, Julie decided to use the tannin bed, and as she's lying there with her headphone on, Ben Willis sneaks in turns the dial up to extra crispy, and binds the door with what looks like a cheap little newspaper bundler. Julie's friends burst into the room, there's a lot of screaming and commotion, but really! - a pair of scissors would have done the trick. Even when Ben Willis plants his hook into flesh it's all staged rather politely - a hand spiked here, a dribble of blood, with none of the outrageously gross, limb splitting carnage that all but defined the slasher genre in the '80s heyday. The gruesome pay off shocks are by now, as generic as who will be the next to die schematic. Jennifer Love Hewitt and Brandy are actresses the way that Annette Funicello and Olivia Netwon John were, but the fact that both of these doe-eyed teen idols happen to be mini-industries means that there's not much doubt about whether they'll truimph over the killer. Hewitt especially, looks as if she could fend him off with a quick flex of her abs. It's not just her body that's sculpted and toned - her entire personality seems aerobicized. She has no visible dirty thoughts, and that makes her the perfect star for a thriller so antiseptic you could eat off one of the corpses.
Review of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
