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A TRIBUTE TO ENZO G. CASTELLARI

Born Enzo Girolami, he was the son of Marino Girolami. Like his father, Enzo was a boxer who became a filmmaker. He looks like a boxer still. Not all movie directors look like they could throw or take a punch. This one happens to. His films are paeans to machismo; not in a toxic way, but in an old-fashioned getting-the-job-done kind of way. Castellari isn’t a household name, unless you’re in a house with Quentin Tarantino or myself. His work doesn’t get featured on TCM or at MoMA or in the Criterion Collection. It can be argued that much of it doesn’t belong there. That’s not for me to argue. All I can tell you is that there aren’t many filmmakers whose movies I’d rather watch, anywhere, any time of day or night… why, are you watching one now? I’ll be right over.  (continue reading on Patreon…)

[THE BIG QUESTION]

With a new legacy sequel to I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER out in theaters, a few of us got to talking, and here’s what about…

Who's your favorite character in the "I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER" series?

BEE DELORES

Growing up in rural West Virginia, my friends and I were obsessed with I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER. Sure, it’s not as sickly trend-setting as SCREAM, but I’d argue it has a much better cast. Our play-pretend always centered around reenacting some slasher – Freddy, Michael, and The Fisherman were in frequent rotation. I always wanted to be Julie and date Ray – I mean, it’s Freddie Prinze Jr., after all! While Julie isn’t exactly Sidney Prescott-levels of Final Girl badassery, she does have my favorite moment between the two.

When Julie dashes into Helen’s bedroom, where Barry consoles her, she brings them out to her car, where she claims she found Max’s cold corpse being eaten by crabs. Barry grabs her keys and shimmies open her trunk – and it’s empty! “I swear it!” Julie claims. “I believe you, Julie,” whispers a restrained Helen, wearing a hat to cover her coleslaw head. The Fisherman is clearly fucking with them. The day before, he tried to run Barry over on the dock, outside the gym. Max’s body was wearing his jacket, as Julie reminds him.

Moments later, Julie unravels a chilling monologue before unleashing a lioness roar:

“What are you waiting for, huh?! What are you waiting for?!”

It still blows my mind that a literal kid came up with that moment; the moment of the entire film forever immortalized with just two lines. It also helps that Jennifer Love Hewitt delivers them with every ounce of power she has, letting those haunted words rattle down into her chest. It’s like that moment in HALLOWEEN H20 when Laurie faces her front and screams for Michael, axe gripped tightly in her hand.

What makes Julie’s bravery so iconic is that it’s a complete 180° turn from earlier in the film, when she wanted so desperately to admit to the police they had hit and killed a man. “I want to do what’s smart,” she later tells Ray. Her strength shines in her cheekbones. Her eyes twinkle with a gumption to finally stop running and face her demons. In the third act, she might not have the same intuitiveness and brawn as many Final Girls – but she more than earns her spot in my heart as one of horror’s most plucky, youth-faced heroines.

BRETT GALLMAN

I have to be honest: I break with my fellow horror fans who have enshrined I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER into the slasher pantheon to the point where it's getting the reverential legacy sequel treatment. Don't get me wrong — it’s a perfectly diverting follow-up from Kevin Williamson that finds him zigging and zagging away from the meta-splatter theatrics of SCREAM, but it's never been a sacred text by any means because, at the end of the day, it still just feels like an imitator of Wes Craven’s seminal slasher (right down to casting a PARTY OF FIVE star in the lead role). And both this Big Question and a recent revisit did little to disavow me of the notion that IKWYDLS largely lacks the indelible characters and iconic moments to help it endure. Sure, there's Jennifer Love Hewitt’s dramatic “What are you waiting for?” moment, and I know Sarah Michelle Gellar’s dearly departed Croaker Queen Helen Shivers has her fans, but beyond that? I'm not sure there's much else beyond the admittedly slick slasher mayhem.

As such, I thought it would be more fun to show some love to I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, the deranged 1998 follow-up that has no shortage of memorable characters or moments. Following in the illustrious footsteps of past sequels that jet off to the Bahamas, ISKWDLS promptly loses its damn mind as it desperately tries to conjure up some reason for this shit happening all over again.

Weaving a convoluted web that involves a terminally horny Mekhi Phifer, rastafarian Jack Black, delightfully shifty Jeffrey Combs, voudou practitioner Bill Cobb, badass Brandy Norwood, and poor Freddy Prinze Jr. getting the PLANES TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES treatment, it all climaxes with the most memorable turn of events so far: Julie James’ new possible love interest Will Benson (Matthew Settle) reveals that we should take his name literally.

He's actually Ben's son, as in Ben Willis, the fisherman killer from the first movie. Also, Ben is somehow still alive and has orchestrated the whole ordeal alongside his son. If only more killers were considerate enough to gift their victims with a trip to the Bahamas before gutting them.

JON ABRAMS

I’m with Brett on this one. No offense. I’m old enough to be able to say I saw I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER in theaters. I was in college. Freshman still? Maybe sophomore. Not much older than the characters and actors in the movie (in some cases). All my new friends took me to see it for my birthday because they knew I had a thing for one of its stars. I’m not proud of it, but I understand it in retrospect. There was trouble acclimating to college for me, trouble getting free of the ghosts of high school. There was a girl towards the end, and I ruined our friendship in a pretty spectacular way, and only as I was literally on the ride up to college for my first day did I realize that — you idiot — maybe she liked me, and I totally destroyed what could have been a sweet thing.

Long story short, she was smart, funny, sarcastic, short-ish, blonde, Jewish, you see where I’m going with this… Meanwhile, this show comes out around this time that has a girl fitting the above description who is on a weekly basis fighting vampires and werewolves, which is right up my alley to say the least. Over winter break, SCREAM hits, I’m there opening weekend, and then I’m hungry to see whatever else its writer comes up with. So then, I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER. All my friends know they’ve got to take me (I don’t have a car), even though none of them give a funk about horror. Except for me.

Obviously my favorite would be Helen Shivers, played by the great Sarah Michelle Gellar.

It’s less about the movie than about the actor. But that’s as good a reason as any, maybe.

What’s sort of funny is that Hewitt and Gellar, as much as they had star personas at that point, were sort of trading them up. Helen Shivers is the pageant queen, the girl everybody wants to be with or be, which if you had asked every other guy I saw the movie with in 1997, would have been Jennifer Love Hewitt. CAN’T HARDLY WAIT, a year later, is built on this persona. Then again, this isn’t exactly Belushi and Aykroyd in NEIGHBORS: If you remember, Buffy was a cheerleader before getting more serious and becoming a Slayer. And it’s not like Gellar can’t play the role. With respect to Mr. Prinze Jr., she sure looks like a pageant winner in the movie.

 Okay. Here come the 28-year-old spoilers…

Buffy Summers is a Final Girl. Helen Shivers is not. She’s the best friend to the Final Girl, which is a historically thankless position, sort of like having to be partner to Dirty Harry. Your days are numbered as soon as the movie opens.

Helen has a bad end. She’s got to watch Barry (Ryan Phillippe) and her sister Elsa (Bridgette Wilson from BILLY MADISON) before being taken out of the picture herself. She puts up as much of a fight as she can, but she’s no Buffy. It’s sort of epic, the chase she leads the killer on, but eventually, she gets caught.

By the way, this is the point where I stood up to leave the theater, back in October of 1997 with nine or ten friends on either side of me. I did not enjoy this turn of events.

If it was any consolation, I was to see Sarah Michelle Gellar in another horror film just two months down the road, but as you surely know,

28-year-old spoilers again

that was no consolation because SCREAM 2 not only gives Sarah Michelle Gellar even less screen time before a deranged killer takes her away again, but it also took my beloved Randy Meeks, as accurate a representation of my spirit and interests as I had seen on screen since Jason Lee in MALLRATS and wouldn’t see again until Tobey Maguire put on the old red-and-blues.

SCREAM 2 basically broke my heart and then killed me in effigy, and I still like it better than SCREAM 3.

Anyway, my friends convinced me to sit back down and watch the rest of I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER. I put those dudes through a lot. No wonder only two out of half a dozen still speak to me.

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER is a solid slasher film. Director Jim Gillespie keeps things moving briskly. Cinematographer Denis Croissan and composer John Debney, both journeymen, come up with better than average compositions. I always remember this film as looking better than many of the teen slashers that quickly followed the first SCREAM. Not quite URBAN LEGEND, but still a fine-looking picture with pretty people and pretty locations providing a memorable contrast to the quick and nasty acts of brutality committed by the killer.

Soundtrack-wise, the movie also gets points for being the first time I heard Type O Negative play in a feature film, definitely a plus. And I always dug the cover of “Hush” that played in what felt like every single TV spot for the movie. (I think it’s in the final movie too, but I don’t recall in which scene.) I don’t believe Jennifer Love Hewitt got a song into I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, but she got one in the sequel! At least her character made it that far…

No, I’m not still bitter.

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER is a decent slasher with a better-than-usual cast that had the misfortune coming right after SCREAM, which was a game-changer. I am long past my odd little crush on SMG, but I still feel it to be fairly obvious that I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER kills off its best actor, which is one reason it didn’t have the fan base of SCREAM or the longevity of other franchises. And more obviously, it doesn’t have the humor or fun meta pranks that the SCREAM movies do. SCREAM came right from the brain of Kevin Williamson. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER was work-for-hire. Good work-for-hire, but just not as filled with passion and inspiration. Also SCREAM had Wes Craven out front. It’s not a fair contest. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER is a good movie with charms of its own that was cursed from the start and forever after to live within a long shadow.

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