With the majority of horror's elite having undergone the reboot-sequel treatment—or, if we're embracing the 2022 Scream lexicon, the 'requel'—Hollywood's descent into the dregs of creativity has become eerily palpable, spanning classics like Halloween, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Exorcist. The original I Know What You Did Last Summer, featuring a youthful ensemble of Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Freddie Prinze Jr., evokes more 90s nostalgia than spine-chilling suspense. As someone born the year it premiered, perhaps my appreciation for Dawson's Creek-esque dialogues and Korn soundtracks falls short, hindering an unbiased evaluation. Yet, the inherent fragility of its beloved predecessor serves as a legitimate catalyst for this 2025 redux. This endeavor could very well be the first transparently money-grubbing requel with the potential to overshadow its forebear, especially when considering the original film's retroactive lens of cancel culture and its paranoid moral scrutinies.
These films, akin to their raincoat-clad antagonists, share a lethally enticing hook. A cohort of attractive, well-bred friends accidentally terminates a stranger's life on a meandering coastal road, seemingly erasing their tracks, only to be haunted, humiliated, and hunted down by a vengeful murderer during the subsequent July Fourth festivities. This fresh batch of protagonists has matured beyond the college-age kids of the original. The manslaughter charge weighs heavily on them, particularly on Teddy (Tyriq Withers), the scion of the town's prominent property tycoon, and his narcissistic fiancée Danica (Madelyn Cline of Outer Banks fame). For Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon of The Wilds), the incident threatens to derail her arduously won recovery from a troubled past.
As for Chase Sui Wonders' Ava in The Studio, it's challenging to discern why such an undefined character would keep their secret—a glaring flaw, especially considering she's the film's lead. Fortunately, she's not the sole 'final girl' in town. Jennifer Love Hewitt reprises her role as Julie James, who guided us through the initial fisherman-killing sprees, now reintroduced as she lectures on Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) at a nearby college. Meanwhile, her co-survivor and ex-husband Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) runs the bar where Stevie works, marking a convergence of past and present horrors.
"I Know What You Did Last Summer" timidly retreats from the carnal delights synonymous with its genre, unfolding more as a tacky mystery than a grandiose Guignol slasher extravaganza. The villain's iconic hook is wielded without any semblance of flair, dissecting flesh and latching onto bone with clinical detachment, all hidden away in swift cutaways. An eye-gouging scene later in the film is entirely omitted from view.
Jim Gillespie's original iteration scarcely indulged in the excesses of the 1980s slasher trend, but it at least adorned itself with vibrant hues and unforgettable imagery, akin to crabs scurrying across a corpse or a hide-and-seek sequence illuminated by bursts of fireworks. Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson ("Do Revenge"), however, displays a tenuous grasp on suspense, tearing each murder to shreds through jarring edits and tight, handheld camera angles.
The film's sanitized tone also permeates its characters. Robinson and co-writer Sam Lansky overlook the fact that, at their core, these individuals are hardly endearing. Perhaps these affluent brats don't merit a hook through the skull, but neither are we inclined to cheer them on; when we revisit them a year hence, we discover that their moral lapse has merely manifested as mild alcoholism at worst.
Concurrently, these archetypal rich kids are polished down to meet some arbitrary standard of likability — they're altogether too benevolent for the audience to take delight in their comeuppance. The millennial-penned dialogue of its Gen Z ensemble (who still leave voicemails as if it's 1997) vacillates between archaic and irritating, occasionally veering into the realm of "Jennifer's Body" with groan-worthy gems like "gentrifi-slay-tion," or the sight of a character pleading for his life by offering the contents of his crypto wallet.
The casting of model and Charli XCX collaborator Gabbriette as a true-crime podcaster (whose series is titled "Live, Love, Slaughter") strikes as blatant Zoomer pandering.
The charm of disposable horror sequels lies in witnessing how far an original concept can be stretched on a shoestring budget; the spectacular misfires that can ensue — such as the Y2K sci-fi escapade "Jason X" or the gloriously gimmicky "Saw 3D" — are all part of the allure. No one was precisely clamoring to see Leatherface commit an Instagram Live massacre beneath sleek LED strips, but a part of me was glad to witness one of horror's preeminent cross-dressers being unleashed from the closet once more.
What dooms "I Know What You Did Last Summer" is its lack of commitment to anything beyond the original film, failing miserably as horror, morality tale, or irony-laden comedy.
