I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)

The second installment in a franchise about a fisherman with a hook and a long memory arrives with the modest ambition of repeating the first film in a warmer climate. Julie James, still haunted, wins a radio contest she did not enter and is promptly shipped to a Bahamian resort where the staff are murdered in ascending order of usefulness. The storm that strands the guests is a plot device, not a warning about anything. The film has no interest in the weather beyond its capacity to close a dock, and no interest in the island beyond its capacity to supply a body count.

What distinguishes the production, mildly, is its ensemble. Brandy plays Karla with a comic timing the script does not deserve, Mekhi Phifer gives Tyrell a warmth that survives the dialogue, and Bill Cobbs and Jennifer Esposito round out a cast noticeably more varied than the 1998 slasher average. None of this is remarked upon by anyone on screen. The film casts these performers and then kills them on schedule, which is a kind of equality, of the bleakest sort. The gesture is real and the commentary is absent, and the movie seems content to leave it there.

Elsewhere the ledger is blank. The resort's labor hierarchy goes unexamined. A voodoo subplot is deployed as set dressing with no curiosity about where it came from. The romance is heterosexual and contractual. No character pauses mid-chase to correct a historical record, interrogate a power structure, or reflect on the body. The film's only sermon is delivered by a hook, and it is brief. Critics handed it ten percent on Rotten Tomatoes while audiences handed it eighty-four million dollars worldwide. It wanted a scream from us. It got one, and then it went back to the water.