Directed By: Stacey Edmonds, Doug Turner
Starring: Jai Koutrae, Stacey Edmonds, Az Jackson
Tag line: "Mass murder, it's just not cricket"
Trivia: During the shower scene, Arianna Starr, aka Miss Nude Australia, stood in for Stacey Edmonds
A zero-budget slasher film from Australia, I Know How Many Runs You Scored Last Summer comes up short in a few areas, but blood and gore sure isn’t one of them!
A psychopath who, 20 years earlier, was terrorized by the other members of his cricket team has come looking for revenge. Using his cricket equipment (which has been slightly modified with nails and razor blades), he’s already managed to kill several of his now-adult former teammates, and Detective Gary Chance (Jai Koutrae) wants to make sure he doesn’t finish the job. With the help of his partner Det. Shane Scott (Az Jackson) and Kim Reynolds (Stacey Edmonds) of Scotland Yard (who was tracking the killer back in England, where he began his murder spree), Det. Chance rounds up the surviving members of the team and hides them away in a safe house, where they’ll remain until the killer can be brought to justice. But, alas, the house isn’t nearly as safe as they anticipated, and one by one, the former cricketers meet a grisly end. Will the three detectives capture this sports-centric lunatic, or will they, instead, become his next victim?
Even by slasher standards, the characters in I Know How Many Runs You Scored Last Summer are an unlikable bunch. The five team members brought to the safe house, namely David Yeo (David Gambin), Craig Steadman (Aaron Scully), Terry O’Sullivan (Ben Paul Jones), Jonathan Wiley (Alex Sideratos), and Matthew King (James Winter), are obnoxious as hell, but worse still is the movie’s so-called “hero”, Det. Chance, who, from the moment he first appears, acts like a total jackass (two minutes after meeting Det. Kim Reynolds, he’s already hitting on her and making sexist remarks). In most slasher films, there’s at least one character to root for. Not here. What’s more, the final act, when the killer kicks it up a notch, plays like a montage of unrelated violent scenes, with the murders coming so quickly, one on top of the other, that you’d think the killer was in two, sometimes three places at once. And while I personally had no issue whatsoever with the extended shower scene (for which Arianna Starr, aka Miss Nude Australia, acted as Stacey Edmonds’ body double), I’ll admit it did run a tad too long.
That said, I Know How Many Runs You Scored Last Summer is, at times, a stylish motion picture, with co-directors Stacey Edmonds and Doug Turner (who also wrote, edited, and co-starred) utilizing split screens and an up-tempo soundtrack to keep the action moving along at a solid pace. Yet what really stands out is the gore; from the opening scene, where the killer pounds a sharpened game stick into a victim’s mouth with his cricket bat, to the unfortunate soul who’s forced to put on an athletic supporter with nails pounded into it, the movie lets the blood flow freely. When all is said and done, I Know How Many Runs You Scored Last Summer isn’t going to blow you away, but there’s enough here to keep things interesting while it lasts.
