I Still Know What You Did Last Summer - R

We know what sequel shouldn't have been made.

Rating: R for violence, profanity, drug use and sexual innuendo Studio: Columbia Tristar Directed By: Danny Cannon Cast: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr. Running Time: 100 minutes Release Date: 11/13/1998 Genre: Horror

Common Sense Note

Parents should know that despite the upscale production values and name cast, this is a pretty violent wallow. Characters are killed in bloody closeup, usually with sharp instruments, and much of the alleged entertainment derives from terrorizing a young woman.

Families can talk about the difference between scary movies that can have fun with the shock clichés (Scream) and scary movies that are just stupid.

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Common Sense Review

Reviewed By: Charles Cassady, Jr.

The original I Know What You Did Last Summer at least had a token moral message (mainly grandfathered in by the popular YA Lois Duncan novel that inspired it), about four teenagers failing to take responsibility for a seeming hit-and-run fatality they caused, and the guilt that tears them apart -- plus a vengeful fisherman named Ben Willis, who did plenty of tearing apart on his own, typically with big hooks. This pointless sequel doesn't even have that slim reason to exist.

Ben Willis was seemingly eliminated, but now surviving heroine Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) suffers repeated nightmares and shock-cut glimpses of the homicidal, raincoat-clad Ben lurking around.

Those boo! tricks are wildly overdone here. Mostly it turns out to be her fun-loving college roommate Karla (R&B diva Brandy) or her associates. When Julie and Karla hear they've won a free trip to the Bahamas they anticipate romance and good times on the beach. Instead, in a pretty obvious horror-film setup -- lacking only that gothic castle on a cliff that Gilligan, Skipper, and the rest of the castaways sometimes wandered into -- the characters arrive at a sparsely-populated, isolated island resort with their boyfriends. There's no way off, a storm brewing, surly staff, and threatening (West Indian) domestics with stereotypical voodoo aspects. Sure enough, murders start happening again, but nobody believes Julie's witnessing bloody corpses lying around until it's too late.

In keeping with Jennifer Love Hewitt's occasional forays into music, Julie has a big karaoke-singing scene, and there are giggles when the filmmakers try to make karaoke into something scary. Meanwhile co-star Brandy's character talks big about being tough and able to defend herself against any marauders in rain slickers, but when that actually happens she mostly screams and stumbles. A dumb ending opens the door to further sequels, perhaps the best argument yet for always reporting your traffic mishaps to the authorities.

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Content		CS	adults	kids
Content
Sexual Content Characters talk about sex but never get around to doing it. A joke scene makes it appear that strenuous bedroom action is happening, when it's just a character jumping up and down on the mattress little-girl-style.
Violence Bloody impalings (two characters are skewered on the same knife), death by gaffing-hook, vicious beatings, shootings.
Language Abundant profanity.
Message
	Social Behavior While heroine Julie struggles with her conscious a little bit over covering up deadly indiscretions in her past, there's really not even the token soul-searching that went on in the previous film. Her black best pal pretends to be tough and assertive, but when faced with a maniacal killer she mostly screams and falls down a lot. West-Indian islanders are domestics who exist only to be ominous or slain or both.
	Commercialism
	Drug/Alcohol/Tobacco Recreational drinking. Comic-relief character of a marijuana-smoking island handyman, or something, whose sole function seems to be there smoking joints and offering to hook the characters up with dope of their own.