Young Blood

Jodie Foster finally figures out who's been killing and skinning young girls all over the Midwest in The Silence of the Lambs, but only succeeds in tracking the killer down by sidling up to a serial cannibal (Anthony Hopkins) who later escapes from prison by exploiting careless police work. Warden Tommy Lee Jones so completely screws things up in Natural Born Killers that his penitentiary gets taken over by deranged prisoners who subsequently tear him to pieces. In The Vanishing, Kiefer Sutherland is forced to mount his own investigation into his girlfriend's disappearance when the police lose interest in the crime. In I Know What You Did Last Summer, the cops can't even do the math to realize, "Hey, we got a serial killer on the loose here!"

You only need to look at Morgan Freeman's performances as refined, cerebral, slow-to-anger detectives in Seven and Kiss the Girls to figure out that you can't count on our major police institutions to save your kid from a psychopath. Heck, Morgan Fairchild would have needed less time to bust these cases wide open.

Finally, it is important for parents concerned about serial killers to teach their children not to provide serial killers with justification for their killing. In this regard, I Know What You Did Last Summer could turn out to be the most valuable item in your Home Serial-Killer Film Library. In this movie, high school heartthrobs Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar and their arrested-development boyfriends accidentally run over a stranger who suddenly looms up in front of their sports car on a dimly lit road. Thinking that he is dead, and not wanting to wreck their college careers, they dump his body in the ocean. Alas, he is not dead, not even close to it, and even though we subsequently learn that he is a cold-blooded murderer who deserved to be dumped into the ocean by amoral teenagers, this does not diminish the enormity of the adolescents' crime. Even though the people who made the movie seem to think that it does.

The seemingly drowned man returns from the dead and understandably starts stalking his murderers, whereupon the kids find themselves in quite a bind. They can't go to the police and tell them what they have done, because that would involve confessing to attempted murder or leaving the scene of a crime or something else that could get them five years in prison or, at the very least, grounding for a week. Also, they know cops are idiots. They have no choice but to gut it out, while they themselves are systematically gutted.

Of all the films in the serial-killer genre, I Know What You Did Last Summer is the one that young parents should pay closest attention to. If you're going to raise your kids to be solid, upstanding citizens who don't heedlessly turn themselves into serial-murder victims, you must instill in them a clearly delineated sense of right and wrong. That means sitting them down at some point and explaining in no uncertain terms that if they ever find themselves on a dark, lonely highway at night and they accidentally run over a complete stranger, they should immediately report it to the proper authorities. Dumping what appears to be a corpse in a nearby ocean is not the way we do things in this society. It's tasteless, it's foolish and it's wrong, but most important of all, it might kill you.

Finally, parents should periodically take out their Home Serial-Killer Library copy of Copycat and fast-forward to the scene where serial-killer expert Sigourney Weaver tells a transfixed audience that 9 out of 10 serial killers are white males, ages 20 to 35. This would seem to suggest that the kids might be better off moving to Fiji or Hokkaido or Sierra Leone. One final helpful hint: if you're a blind cellist who's being stalked by a serial killer the way Uma Thurman is in Jennifer Eight, don't count on a policeman to help you because if he's like Thurman's policeman boyfriend, he'll already be under arrest on suspicion of killing his partner. Since few blind cellists read Movieline, we encourage subscribers who have blind cellist friends to pass along this information.

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Joe Queenan wrote about foreign films for the November '98 issue of Movieline.

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