"I Know What You Did Last Summer" (1997) was a really good horror film. It had a good plot, good death scenes, and a good ending, that did not need to be changed. This film was just plain awful. I can't even say this is a typical sequel, since typical sequels don't usually manage to be THIS much worse than the original, except in extreme cases, such as "Exorcist II: The Heretic" (1977). This film makes the same first mistake as "Exorcist II" which is getting a different director AND a different writer. "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" abandons the whole revenge (or any) motive from the first film and uses a good movie as an excuse to make an incredibly bad one. It would probably be considered mediocre by the "Friday the 13th" standards, which were incredibly low. The only imaginable reason a sequel might be considered unnecessary is because the first one ended with Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) getting killed by the supposedly dead killer. I can even understand why people wouldn't want it to end that way, although I really thought that was a cool and original way to end a horror movie to let the main character die AND letting the villain carry on. The first thing "I Still Know" establishes is that that was just a dream, which means that a sequel is not necessary, and then, as if to say "but now that we've gotten you into the theater", the killings start again. In "I Know What You Did Last Summer" the killer killed with a purpose, usually because someone stood in the way of him getting revenge. Even Max's death had a purpose -- letting the characters know he was serious. In this movie, the title of which isn't worth re-typing over and over again, someone who the main characters met for about 20 seconds get killed just because there are only two people who he really has a reason to be after, and on a standard horror movie setting of a remote island, he has to go out of his way to kill as many people as possible, and it has to stretch into two hours, which is kind of like trying to stretch a single pepperoni over an extra large pizza. The thing that I thought was creepy from the first movie was that whenever the killer was near, you'd hear the sound made by the locket thing that David Egan was going to give his fiancee before she died in the car accident they were in, and the killer took it. David Egan is never even mentioned in this film. The acting was really weak as well. Even the few who were in the first movie seemed not to be trying very hard, perhaps because they realized early on that it wasn't really worth the effort. My only other possible explanation is that the filmmakers were trying to make a very bad movie, which only seems plausible to me because I saw this and know just how bad it was. It just seems kind of hard to find someone who can make a film so bad by accident. I suppose the standard plot twist toward the end of the movie, the one I saw coming 38 minutes into the movie (I checked my watch) was supposed to justify the fact that this film was made. It didn't come close, and perhaps it took me 38 minutes to figure it out (this includes promos) because I was half-asleep by this point. I really was, too. After this film was made, basically the only way you can enjoy the first one again is by forgetting this was ever made. This was not based on a novel the way the first one was, and really had nothing to do with the story. With lame dialogue, about 7 false alarms before the first real one (the noise that turns out to be the roommate, the scene that turns out to be a dream, etc.) and little happening that you can't predict an hour in advance, this must be one of the worst films ever made .
