Oct 19, 2021

"I Know What You Did Last Summer": LGBTQ Representation. For Two Episodes, Anyway


In the original I Know What You Did Last Summer movie (1997), four teens driving along the North Carolina coast accidentally hit and kill a pedestrian.  Instead of, say, calling the police, they throw the body in the ocean and get on with their lives.  But a year later, a slasher who "knows what you did last summer" starts slashing them and their friends, leaving only the the Last Girl, Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and her boyfriend, Ray (Freddie Prinz Jr.), to smooch and declare their love for each other.




A sequel was inevitable.  In I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), the slasher continues to vex heterosexual college sweethearts Julie and Ray and their friends, including a token black guy (Mekhi Pfifer).  He gets slashified, but Julie and Ray survive, and get married. 

Someone said that tragedies end with a stage littered with bodies, and comedies end with a wedding.  






Eight years later, the franchise continued with I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006).  This time four teens accidentally kill a peer in a prank that goes wrong, and a year later the slasher starts slashing. The Last Girl's boyfriend (David Paetkau, left) gets sliced and diced, but she survives with a new beau (Ben Easter).

I never saw any of these movies -- they sounded heterosexist to the max, and besides, the slasher genre is stale.  But I watched the first two episodes of the new Amazon retread, I Know What You Did Last Summer.  This time the setting is a small town in Hawaii, and the squashed pedestrian is Allison, the straightlaced, uber-square twin sister of boozing, drugging, screwing wild child Lennon.  Or is it Lenon who was squashed, and Allison decided on a dead-sister masquerade?  And, for the first time in I Know history,  one of the teens is gay: Johnny (Sebastian Amoroso).  He even discusses dating a guy at the gym, Erik (Duncan Kamakana), although they're not shown kissing or anything.


Ok, I've tried 15 times to get that last name right.  Amoroso makes the most sense, since it's an actual Italian word, but Google doesn't have any images of an actor named Sebastian Amoroso.  Wikipedia says Amoruso, but it also calls Johnny "Jhonny."    Amaroso?  Amoruso?  Amaruso? Amando?   How about a photo of Duncan Kamakana instead?

Four episodes have dropped to date, but I'm only planning to watch two, because:

Johnny and Eric are the first to die.

Bury your gays.






2 comments:

  1. In the new Halloween movie- there is a gay couple who gets killed too

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Remember black dude dies first? Same thing.

      Delete

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