MovieChat Forums > I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) Discussion > Why set up a mystery over who the killer...

Why set up a mystery over who the killer is when in the end it is just a random guy?


Like the movie but always thought that was weird

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Because it's a bad movie

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It turned out to be the father of the guy they killed. So not that random.

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No, he was the father of the girl who dated the guy we saw sitting on top of the cliff in the beginning. The father was also the one they hit with the car.

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Sorry. It's been a while since I saw it. Although what you just said ruins the movie for me a bit. So it's just some random guy who happened to witness what they did. I had thought the killer was killing them for what they did to his son. Now it's just some random guy who saw what happened. Ugh!

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The killer was the father of a girl who died accidentally because of a guy called David Egan

The father/killer had just finished killing David Egan when he got run over

The mystery freaking sucks. The David Egan stuff is really just added as a red herring

It doesn't add motive, the main characters had nothing to do with his daughter's death. I mean I guess the fact that he got run over and his daughter died in a car accident made him extra angry at these reckless teens, but Ben Willis never gets any real characterization so that is just a guess

It's lame how they tack him on at the end. I think that the sequel has a more satisfying mystery to it, even if the rest of the movie is worse

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"It doesn't add motive, the main characters had nothing to do with his daughter's death."

Motive was not really important in this movie. Except for Ray perhaps, the motive was revenge for the accident. The question was simply who the stalker/killer was, so they could stop him.

The sequel was awful. The less said about it, the better.

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I like IKWYDLS but will admit the “mystery” aspect is terrible .. I remember the first time watching it and going “oh so that’s it?”.. lame but the movie is still fun

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No, that's not what happened either. The old guy they hit with the car had just killed the young guy we previously saw sitting on top of the cliff because he was involved in an accident that killed the old guy's daughter. The old guy survived being hit by the teens' car and started to terrorize them a year later because they had left him to die.

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Why did the old guy kill the young guy?

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"because he was involved in an accident that killed the old guy's daughter"

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I actually knew that so I don’t know why I asked that lol. I just hate that plot point

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Why do you hate it? Without it the whole whodunnit mystery angle doesn't really work.

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Oh I love the “whodunit” in this movie but it just rang hollow to me after the reveal. I think they could have given a better motive or background to the killer(fisherman) .. do you like it
The way it is?

Have you read the book? Is there a mystery aspect to that?

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I like it well enough, the misdirection is kind of different than usual.

I haven't read the book, but I know the twist is not exactly the same. The person they hit is a young boy and he doesn't survive. They wonder if their stalker is one of his parents, but it turns out he's actually his brother who also pretended to be Julie's as well as Helen's love interest throughout the book.

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No it was the guy they hit. He was the father of the girlfriend of the guy at the beginning.

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Just because we didn't see him before, does not mean it was random. The whole accident with his daughter was explicitly mentioned.

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The twist was that it wasn’t David Eagan who they thought it was (the guy on the cliff) it was Ben Willis instead who turned out to be a psycho killer.

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Correct. They were pursuing the wrong guy.

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