Babes in Hollywood

By Ewan McDonald

Latest on video

Burning questions that confront us on the edge of the millennium: who is that woman next to Carlos Spencer in the All Blacks ad? Hasn't Walter Little shown enough, especially for the British Barbarians and New Zealand A, to get his test jersey back? And who are all these kids with names like Jennifer Love Hewitt and Reese Witherspoon that the kids go to see at the movies?

The last one, at least, is easy enough to answer. They're the products of the starmaking machinery which Rupert Murdoch perfected and which runs like a Beverly Hills version of a Detroit assembly line these days.

Take half a dozen cute teenagers. Put them in a show on your TV network, like Party of Five, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina. Write them up in your TV guide and supermarket tabloids. Make a record too, because with modern studio technology they don't have to be able to sing, and put it out on your label. All of a sudden the kids are stars and you can put them in movies. Which helps when you own a studio like, say, 20th Century Fox ...

The formula worked so brilliantly that the fairly routine teen-slasher flick I Know What You Did Last Summer was a box-office smash for Columbia Pictures and a sequel was only a matter of time.

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, the week's big video rental release, reunites the cast a year after the first movie, in which Julie James (Love Hewitt) spent a harrowing summer running for her life, dealing with the brutal murders of her high school friends and wondering what to do with her hair.

Julie has fled to college in Boston. But on the anniversary of the deaths, her grades are slipping and her relationship with high school sweetheart Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr) has hit the skids. Things look up when room-mate Karla (Brandy) wins an all-expenses-paid Bahamas holiday for four, but when the group arrive they find the other hotel guests leaving because it's hurricane season.

The students' romantic island getaway turns into a holiday of murder and mayhem.

This movie is made for an audience and that audience will love it. But if you're old enough to remember Prinze's far funnier father on TV, you're not the person who should be watching I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.

* Older fans of horror might like to try John Carpenter's Vampires, with James Woods as the head of a team of vampire-slayers that the Vatican sends into the American south-west to sort out the living dead once and for all.

Carpenter has a good reputation in the genre as the director of Halloween but this is not your best work, John.

* The Sheen lads each have a new one on the shelves - Charles with Mare Winningham in Bad Day on the Block, Emilio alongside William Forsythe in Dollar for the Dead. Also around, Dolph Lundgren in Sweepers and martial arts excitement in The Hero.

* Several big, beeeg box-office hits go on sale this week. Wag the Dog, the brilliant satire of presidential politics and spin-doctoring starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro is my personal pick on a list which includes Tommy Lee Jones and Wesley Snipes in U.S. Marshals, the sort-of sequel to The Fugitive; Denzel Washington, John Goodman and Donald Sutherland in the devilish thriller Fallen; Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore's black comedy The Wedding Singer. For the kids, look out for Pocahontas II, in which the little American Indian princess goes to 17th-century London (don't try to teach them history or political correctness from this); Home Alone 3; and a bumper collection of Thomas the Tank Engine stories. That'll keep me and little Luc happy for hours.