I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006)

Director: Sylvain White

Starring: Brooke Nevin, David Paetkau

Run Time: 92 mins

Certificate: 18

 

Plot Outline: A group of friends find themselves being hunted down and killed one-by-one by a mysterious killer exactly a year after a Fourth of July prank on one of their friends goes horribly wrong and they cover up what happened.

The Review: It's been a whole nine years since the original I Know What You Did Last Summer hit cinemas to a reasonably successful run. It's not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination but it isn't that bad (believe me when you've seen of the films I have, it looks like a masterpiece). And it's been eight years since the coffers were ringing by the release of a quickly put together and rather pointless sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. That pretty much followed the conventions of the slasher sequel - more and bloodier kills and little else. So now, eight years on, we get the third film in this series. How many more ridiculous ways can you present the title? Surely it should be I'll Always Know What You Did Nine Summers ago? Or perhaps I Can Vaguely Recall What You Did Last Summer or I Am Trying Really Hard to Think of What You Did Last Summer? Jettisoning Jennifer Love Hewitt (or more likely it was a refusal to appear in any more pointless films on her behalf), the surviving character from the other two films and giving us a totally unrelated film with only the same plot to grind our teeth into, the producers of this have got it all wrong. It's like the later Hellraiser films - simply horror films which have had tiny bits of Pinhead inserted in them to make them look like Hellraiser films. I'm not fooled one bit by this cheap ploy and neither will you, hopefully. I can't recall another unwanted horror series that has had so long to wait between entries as this. Maybe they thought eight years would be enough time for us to forget the whole story of the fisherman and then they could rehash it and say "look, we've made an original film." So anyway let's crack on.

The film introduces us to our cast of Dawson's Creek teens. You know the type - the group of teens without any ugly mates or deficiencies in their skin. The group of teens that seemingly live in a world without adults and that solely consists of partying or sleeping. There is an accident and one of them is killed (his death is pretty silly and contrived) and the others make a pact never to tell anyone else that they were behind it. A year later and they start and get messages from an unknown source, saying that they know what they did last summer. Cue the Scooby Doo moments where the teens immediately start thinking of who the person is. Could it be the sheriff, the guy who acts sinister and menacing every time the camera closes in on him? Or maybe the slightly oddball friend who likes using chainsaws to chop wood in his log cabin? Don't be silly people! The film tries way too hard to make us believe any of these red herrings. Then we're given the most ridiculous idea ever that the fisherman is in fact a spiritual avenger, returning every July 4th to kill teenagers with secrets. Not only does that unfortunately open the way for more unrelated sequels in future, it also creates so many plot holes for the film. I preferred the fisherman being a human like he was in the first (not sure about the second one though) - gives him a bit more reason to extract revenge. I mean if you'd been run over and left for dead and faced with a freakin' huge medical bill, I'm sure you'd want to get your own back somehow.

The bunch of characters we're meant to cheer for are just terrible. The chicks had fine asses and looked good but the only rooting I was doing was for a nudity shot. They are badly written characters and do the most silly things that horror films are famous for. When you know your friends are being killed off and there's a psycho after you, the last thing you do is going for a swim on your own in a deserted swimming pool in the middle of the night! Usually in circumstances like this, you're rooting for the killer to dispatch them in the most grisly way possible but that's not going to happen here given the previously mentioned identity of the fisherman.