I Know What You Did Last Summer has to be one of my most favorite movies of all time. It is an impressively-well-put together film that not only boasts a brilliant cast, score, script and music, but the best directing and atmosphere that has graced our screens in a long time.
Williamson's script is intelligent, and cleverly side-steps all the pit-falls that a movie of this type could have fallen into, and is not too 'hip' as to stumble over its own dialogue. Whereas in Scream (oh come on, it had to be mentioned somewhere), Williamson mocked the 'classy' slashers of the eighties, here he pays tribute to everything that makes an enjoyable and thoroughly entertaining thriller.
The cast (including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jnr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt) surprised me with their finely-honed and believable performances. Their characters may have stuck closely to the clichés of old-fashioned horror, but each handed in a performance that should have won them all Oscars, and their characters are given more depth and emotion than one would expect to find in a movie such as this.
The build up of tension throughout the film is good, and extremely clever (John Debney's excellent score gets top marks in this department), and the idea of a killer that toys with his victims to invoke fear into them before finally killing them is one of genius proportions. The thing that made this movie so unnerving was the whole idea of their 'punishments' being pay-back for what they did. We all know that what they did was morally wrong, but how many of us in their situation would have reacted any differently? Another thing that made this movie so different from other thrillers is the amount of character development that is in it, and the fact that instead of having death after death (therefore eliminating the need for a plot), the film allows us time with each character to get to know them well enough to fear for them when they are attacked.
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