Post by No Personality on Apr 22, 2010 8:21:53 GMT -5
One of the many ways the Summer series (which in the 1990's was only 2 films, so I really want to hear new-millennium horror fans quit complaining about the 90's - I'm looking at you, Rob Zombie; there could have been 5 of them if the utterly rancid Saw series is any indication) differs from the always superior Scream trilogy is that they were handled by different directors. The first director was a rather kindly Scottish lad named Jim Gillespie. From what I can tell, having directed the first smash hit of this series has not helped his career very much. The director of this film is Danny Cannon, a Brit with a bit of a reputation for flash. After this, he directed almost 30 episodes of C.S.I., a show I have absolutely no warm spot for. Inititally, when I saw Still Know however, I was entertained much more than I was by the original film.
Many shots are set up to make you remember them- most of those involving wide shots with some incredible depth of focus. Also, the set-piece nature of the first movie is made a little more complex here. The running scenes are split up into many more pieces than they were before. Or, at least they are in the case of Brandy's long attack scene. Which, if no one else received anything this elaborate here, is this sequel's version of Sarah Michelle Gellar's ordeal from the original. The cop car, into the alley, running in the street, to the store, upstairs, downstairs, upstairs again, into the elevator, out the window, and into the alley again... Impressive, huh? Well, this time you'd be surprised how much glass Brandy ends up being thrown or pulled through (the bedroom glass ceiling, the greenhouse ceiling, the door window, and there was glass through that wall in the lobby she ran into).
Slasher films of the 80's didn't used to make it their business to find interesting locations to set their bodycount in. They were so cheap, they usually couldn't afford anything too nice. And so many of them took place in colleges and sorority houses, which were probably quite easy to come by. You could get those in any U.S. state. And what state was the movie set in? It didn't matter- they all pretty much look the same with low budget camera equipment. But the 90's was different. While Scream concentrated on the horror genre itself with touches of social commentary, satire, and dark or cynical humor scattered throughout- I Know and I Still Know were more about relaxed, lush atmospheres, teen drama, and in the case of the first film- the Scooby Doo-esque "let's solve the mystery together" hijinks.
There's no mystery to solve this time. Other than: what exactly did Julie tell her new friends about the killer, how much do they really know about what's going on, and then- how can she get them to believe that she knows what she's doing? This seriously trips the film up at points. There's even one scene that features the friends turning on each other leading one to accuse Julie of possibly being the killer. Was this done to pad the film out to the same 100-minute running time as the first? Because I think that kind of running time is usually reserved for movies with an actual point to make. Or some sense of subversiveness (we meet again; Scream). There's not even any real drama. Just some TV-quality (to quote a character from this movie) "I'm having problems with my boyfriend, I'm not doing well in school..."
But that's one of this sequel's strong points. That it in fact doesn't aim to be as weepy, depressing, and lethargic as the first. It ends up being the latter of those anyway when it goes into survival-movie mode and I almost feel like I'm watching Rambo ("Yeah? Then we fight!") or something. In fact, with the tropical island setting here, I think we're very much in Jungle-Movie territory. Also- the use of key Black and Latina (Jennifer Esposito) casting. Although for all the jungle movies I have seen, they usually try to avoid huge rain downpours- don't they? Unless they're doing a war movie... to show how jungle rains are big ol' bummers to the troops' morale. But despite that, this movie is all traditional slasher set-up. Increasing the bodycount considerably and allowing the characters to smile a lot before something bummer-y happens.
I see that a plus after the first film. Which was never very convincing when it came to the down-in-the-dumps aspects. For that to really have worked, we would have to know a lot more about the town they all lived in. That town is different for this sequel, where Julie is in college. It's also warmer and sunnier than the breezy coastal fishing 'village' they lived in during I Know. From the start however, Still Know's style is dampened by the whiny TV-quality teen probs. And this isn't my cue to name-drop Moesha... but it is quite the coincidence, isn't it? Consider this: Julie rushes out of a disrupted political science course, her new would-be suitor (following the revelation that the ending to Part 1 was just a nightmare) runs after her, and then she unloads a wholly pathetic mouthful of lame and jittery "I'm this close to failing" tripe.
The reason I point that scene out specifically is because after the new suitor smiles and acts all wholesome, cleancut, down-to-Earth preppie... Julie laughs and is all better. Wait- what? She giggles, smiles, and then becomes sweet-soft-nurturer. Even beyond what she was in the first movie. Her voice lilts and becomes very kidlike. And her gestures all soften up. So... she's gonna be okay (so long as any wackos outfitted in fisherman slickers with hooks for hands don't come along to crap on her parade of I'll-get-through-this). Why then even bother with a scene in a church, for instance? Where she seeks to try to confront her problem and make it go away by accepting blame for hitting a psycho serial killer with her car and nearly killing him. Not accepting this blame was the key to the at-first happy ending from the first movie that was so essential in telling the audience that "the depressing part of the story is all over."
Would you feel guilty for hitting a serial killer with your car? Or, would you back up and run him over again (Jeepers Creepers-style) to make sure you got him good? Okay, this is not a total "WtF?" scenario here. Because the potential was there for the movie to try bringing out something in the Julie character that we didn't know about at first. Maybe something psychological. Maybe something in her subconscious that she only recognizes in dreams. Her inner doormat? Well, she becomes a doormat anyway here. Other than the fact that after she puts on her warrior face she ends up cowering in the actual embrace of the film's killer (there's more to that but I don't want to give it away), she's also wishy-washy about what to do with her moody boyfriend, Ray. Leading the stronger Karla character to grab Julie by the hand frequently and tell her what to do.
Yes, I liked the reference to Abba's "Dancing Queen." But, did anyone notice how Karla is a literal replacement for Julie's original black college friend, Deb? Played by Rasool J'Han, I guess she was just not cute enough to return here. Brandy's nice and all, but she's a willing hologram-2.0 of the original movie's character. Performing the exact same function of enthusiasm-motivator as well. And though she mentions having one single ambition for herself (to change majors), she is a drone. She doesn't eat, she doesn't really have sex, she barely gets angry, and is perpetually calm. Until she's being chased by the killer. Then... well, this may be the wrong time to bring up Disney, but in The Aristocats, the same thing would happen to Marie the sister kitten. She was always in danger as a decoy from the slightly stronger characters and was helpless to do anything to get herself out of a jam.
This isn't a serious issue; obviously the movie has bigger faults. But at one point, the killer is approaching 3 running women with Brandy at the back and... she decides to just stand there and watch the movie's threat approach her (ala- Lucio Fulci's Zombie, and I'm going to talk more about that soon) while the other women are still running. One of them has to actually go back and grab her. This would be ridiculous no matter who was just standing there. And screaming. This movie gets a lot of criticism for the parade of scenes where women scream. Criticism not because it's necessarily sexist (this is really a popcorn horror movie after all) but because it's seen as annoying by mainstream critics. And even some horror movie veterans (Candyman's director, Bernard Rose in particular, says he hates the sound of women screaming).
Another element that really could have added something to the movie (but doesn't) is the reveal that there is a creepy guy on the island who knows about voodoo. Strangely enough, this doesn't give him any kind of leg-up on the killer nor does it help the teen characters out in any way. It's intended to. But the movie doesn't even bother to do any research on the subject (a 20-minute episode of Vh1's So NoTorious actually did so they wouldn't get their dialogue wrong... a 20-minute episode of a Beverly Hills-set sitcom spoof knows more about voodoo than this Hollywood-funded horror film). So I guess it's meant to just be mysterious and threatening in a very general, ignorant sense. Even then Dario Argento invigorated the hell out of Suspiria's "do you know anything about witches?," so we know it's not impossible for a movie that knows nothing about witchcraft / voodoo to be compelling.
You may have guessed, since that's the 2nd name-drop for a famous Italian horror movie, that I'm about to take you out of American slasher territory. Yes, I am. I read a review of this movie over a year ago that outright mentioned Witchery and did the writer or director of I Still Know actually see that film... Well, there's no audio commentary to confirm that for sure but my money is on: yeah, he did. It's not overwhelming at first but there are obvious signs. One is- the boat to the island and the island itself. In Witchery, the film takes place in a deserted old hotel in Massachusetts. That in that film is a slight rip-off of Lucio Fulci's The Beyond, which took place in a deserted old hotel in Louisiana. Obviously the atmospheres are different (and I'll explain that in my soon upcoming Spotlight for Witchery) for those films but between Witchery and Still Know, they're a much closer match.
The thing about the boat is that not only is it a small boat driven by a guy who's, objectively-speaking, a dead ringer for the guy from Witchery, but the boat goes bye-bye and now the characters are stuck on the island with no way off. Until, someone decides to try and rescue them. Same thing happens in Witchery. Both hotels have a history of murder and witchcraft appears in both films. More specifically, the tie between an object taken from a person used to either hurt or protect them (in this film clearly it's to protect, whereas in Witchery it's clearly to hurt). I guess that's about it for Witchery ('cause then we get into typical Filmirage batshit craziness / see: Troll 2), but there is definitely a scene here stolen right out of The Beyond. Ray at the telephone booth cut to the telephone ringing inside the empty hotel lobby with camera moving around the room.
This film is bound to stand as something of a "Who's Who" of famous people who were not yet famous. Jack Black (of Tenacious D infamy, then later a legitimate film career with School of Rock), a man I doubt would ever be embarrassed to admit he played a whigga rasta-wannabe in this film with a pot addiction. Jennifer Esposito, who joined the cast of Fox's Spin City not very long after this, then Eva Mendes'd her way into Hollywood cred with 2004's fairly worthless and completely redundant racial tension expose, Crash. Then... well, we couldn't call Jennifer Love Hewitt or Brandy not yet famous since they came from TV's Party of Five and Moesha. Together here, they're really America's sweethearts- I've always respected both as being healthy (if not role models) Hollywood celebrities for people to find charming.
But the amazingly hunky Matthew Settle sure blew up after this film, didn't he? He now has 83 episodes of Gossip Girl on his resume and was even a TNT-network original star a few years back (and that's something I make note of just because of the way they pimp out anyone they get in an advertisement for new shows... probably because USA has been kicking their asses for years with Monk, then House, now In Plain Sight). I'll bet he wishes he could make this and The In-Crowd vanish into thin air, now in his 40's, he was a bit too 30-something to be a teen idol even though he was only 28 when he did this film. Still, none of these kids come close to out-doing Anne Heche, who even in her tiny part in the first film, still powerhouses (though not quite to the Betsy Palmer in Friday the 13th degree) compared to the Sheryl Crow-looking Nancy - who seems to be trying to do a goth chick meets The Craft's white trash Nancy meets Alanis Morissette (ala- the pissed off "You Oughta Know" music video).
