This adaptation of the novel by Lois Duncan begins with a violent accident that changes the lives of four teenage friends: sensible Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), beauty queen Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), bad boy jock Barry (Ryan Philippe), and nice guy Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) unwittingly run over and kill a man crossing a mountain road on the night of July 4. Instead of facing possible vehicular manslaughter charges--the car seats are doused with alcohol, thanks to hard-drinking Barry's clumsiness--the group decide to dump the body and keep that terrible night a secret for the rest of their lives. The foursome never see each other again until exactly one year later, after Julie receives an ominous note which gives the film its title.

I Know... is a more conventional thriller than Scream, which mined a mother lode of satire with its lampooning of horror cliches. Yet while it does follow a formulaic pattern, Williamson's script does not indulge in the typical "I'll be right back" norms. Certain characters are smarter than others, but most of the time everyone's frontal lobes are in working order. Thankfully, though, Williamson does not play everything completely straight; some arch bits of dialogue provide some good laughs, and Helen's beauty pageant scenes are hilarious in their dead-on cheesiness.

Williamson does fall short, however, in creating four memorable characters. Unlike Scream, which had a number of interesting, distinctive people on the canvas, here there are only two: blowhard Barry and especially the narcissistic, hair-obsessed Helen. Unfortunately, these two and the boring Ray take a backseat to the dull-as-dishwater Julie, played with little spark by Hewitt, a pallid stand-in for Neve Campbell. I suppose Gillespie wanted to play up the Scream connection by casting another Party of Five co-star in the lead, but he would have had a better leading lady in the gifted Gellar, whom I have admired since her pre-Buffy '93-'95 stint as hellion Kendall Hart on All My Children (which won her a Daytime Emmy). Granted, Helen is a flashier role than Julie, but the seamless manner in which Gellar slides from comical self-absorption to gut-wrenching fear hints at how much more life and conviction she would have brought to the lead.