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  • I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (2025) Review

    I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (2025) Review


    Introduction

    With the success (I use this term loosely) of the Scream franchise’s reboot and the profitability of scary movies in general, it was inevitable that another bygone horror franchise would be brought back from the dead. After all, horror movies are almost always inexpensive to make. People rarely develop horror movie fatigue. And nostalgia is a powerful box office force. Or so I’m told.

    I’m sure that’s what the studio executives were thinking when they assigned a random intern to go dumpster diving in their subterranean landfill of DVD cases. That intern stumbled across a battered copy of I Know What You Did Last Summer. Said intern excitedly ran to the executive suite, threw the DVD at the leather chair facing the window, and then Ubered to their college campus to change majors. And that is how reboots get made. Or so I’m told.

    I Know What You Did Last Summer
    Jonah Hauer-King, Sarah Pidgeon, Chase Sui-Wonders, Madelyn Cline, and Tyriq Withers in “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (2025). Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Releasing.

    The Resurrection

    I Know What You Did Last Summer is an obvious choice to resurrect if the target audience is people who were teenagers in the 1990s who still have bad taste in movies. The original film was not particularly well-liked by critics (43% positive rating) and grossed only $125 million. Its sequel plummeted to a 10% critical rating and $84 million box office. Thus, effectively killing the franchise. A direct-to-DVD sequel in 2006 and a short-lived Amazon Prime series in 2021 served only to prove that people didn’t like the franchise. Yet, here we are in 2025 with another requel (I will always hate the writers of Scream 5 for coining that term).

    Rebooting a 1990s horror franchise isn’t the only lesson I Know What You Did Last Summer took from the Scream reboot. Like Scream 5, I Know What You Did Last Summer is very much a remake of the original. Yet it’s also a sequel. In this case, a sequel to the second film (I Still Know What You Did Last Summer), which brings back the original survivors, and all but puts a nametag on the killer early in the film, and isn’t scary at all.

    In case you weren’t a teenager in the 1990s and never saw it, the original film’s plot was that a group of young people accidentally ran over a guy with their car, tried to cover it up, then were systematically murdered a year later by a killer seeking revenge who knew what they had done. This remake has the same plot but dumbs down the setup so much that even The Fast and Furious writers are shaking their heads in incredulity.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IceTkSOSNJI

    Synopsis

    This time, reunited friends Danica (Madelyn Cline), Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) are watching fireworks from the side of a road on a cliff with a blind curve. A car comes speeding around the bend, swerves to avoid hitting Teddy, crashes into the guard rail, and plummets to the ground below. Teddy calls 9-1-1, then convinces the group that they need to leave before the cops and paramedics show up. But why?

    Even if they were worried they could be blamed, the obvious lie is to just tell the cops the car was speeding around the curve and lost control, simply leaving out the part where Teddy was standing in the road. They even tried to stop the car from falling when it was teetering on the cliff’s edge. Not only is this a scenario where fleeing the scene and keeping it a secret makes no sense, but talking to the cops and fibbing would have strengthened the killer’s motivation.

    Discussion

    Speaking of the killer, wow, was it obvious early on who the killer was? I won’t tell you why or how, but it’s nearly impossible to miss. The only real question is whether there is just one killer or multiple killers. Scratch that, two questions. The other question is, why does I Know What You Did Last Summer feature exactly no scary scenes whatsoever?

    I Know What You Did Last Summer
    Jennifer Love Hewitt in “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (2025). Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Releasing.

    The original film was a straight slasher flick. It went for scares. The remake tries to reinvent itself more as a comedy horror, but forgets to tell most of the actors about the comedy part, and forgets to add elements that make horror movies frightening. The result is a very non-scary contrast of Wonders, Pidgeon, and Freddie Prinze Jr., all taking the movie way too seriously, and Hauer-King and Jennifer Love Hewitt phoning it in. Cline and Withers steal every scene because they got the memo about the comedy part.

    Yes, Hewitt and Prinze Jr. return in their original roles. Sarah Michelle Gellar returns as well, but only in a dream sequence. Which is a shame because she also nailed the comedy part in her one scene. By the time the credits rolled – including a very predictable mid-credit scene – the only question I had was how much of the movie’s entertainment value was intentional. Many in the audience had fun watching it, but I think it’s because they saw it in a packed theater.

    Conclusion

    Given the bad screenplay, laughably stupid dialogue, lack of frights or thrills, and mostly bad performances, I Know What You Did Last Summer is the kind of movie that typically leaves audiences grumbling. I think Cline was so fun to watch that she lifted an otherwise lackluster movie to the kind of movie you watch with a bunch of friends, a bunch of alcohol, and a bunch of running commentary. Which is how the entire franchise should be watched. Still.

    Rating: Ask for sixteen dollars back. Or so I’m told.

    More from Cinema Scholars:

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    MAD HEIDI: A Review Of The Modern Grindhouse Epic

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  • I Know What You Did Last Summer review – cramped…

    I Know What You Did Last Summer review – cramped…



    After 30 years, fans can breathe a sigh of relief – Julie James and Ray Bronson are back! Now, ​“Who are Julie James and Ray Bronson…and what fans?” I hear you ask. These are minor quibbles in the bigger picture: for some reason they’ve put together a legacy sequel to Jim Gillespie’s 1997 slasher underdog, I Know What You Did Last Summer.

    It’s difficult to grasp why this version of I Know What You Did Last Summer was made – the bubble for horror legacy sequels has effectively burst after endless, largely bad iterations. Had this been greenlit six months later, it would have likely been a hard reboot; instead, we get an odd, ungainly hybrid with an identity crisis. As in the original, here a new group of hot young people accidentally kill a man in a car accident on the Fourth of July and swear each other to secrecy. A year later, a masked fisherman rocks up in town wielding a big hook to exact his revenge… but this time the group can turn to the original 90s survivors, Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr), for help. 

    Get more Little White Lies

    It is a strange, sporadically entertaining blend of far more ideas than you’d expect from, well, an I Know What You Did Last Summer legacy sequel. Director and writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson grapples with wellness culture, gentrification, institutional misogyny and the life altering effects of trauma, all the while executing some of the most loyal fan service I’ve ever seen to two films from the late 90s and early 00s that not many people remember, let alone care about. Even as someone who adores the original film (to the point that one side character’s shared surname with the first film’s director did not go unnoticed) it is still mind-boggling that this strange not-quite-reboot made it to screen. This is Avengers: Endgame for a mostly unbeloved 90s slasher – there is quite literally a mid-credits scene with Jennifer Love Hewitt in Nick Fury drag teeing up a sequel. The target audience is me, a couple of my friends, and maybe 40 to 50 other people on planet Earth.

    Since it makes so little sense to do a slavish legacy sequel for I Know What You Did Last Summer of all properties, it gives Robinson extensive wiggle room to do whatever she wants. Scream, its spoiled cousin, is a roundly beloved franchise and was too important to screw up or fundamentally meddle with when they brought it back in 2022. I Know What You Did Last Summer strikes out in far more compelling ways than that Scream sequel – which buckled under the weight of its ouroboric meta narrative – ever did.

    If I Know What You Did Last Summer has loftier ambitions than the average slasher, these are fatally cramped by the limitations of the IP sandbox it’s playing in. The film violently seesaws between paying homage to the original and carving its own path, with Robinson taking some big swings and misses several of them for purely technical reasons. The featherweight script (co-written with Sam Lansky) is too unserious to sell the film’s absurd, intense finale, and the pair have a strong affinity for tin-eared ​‘girls rule, boys drool’ feminism, peppering in baffling, entirely unironic lines about how the entire film’s bloodbath could have been avoided ​“if men just went to therapy.” This doesn’t cohere with any of the characters’ established personalities and creates tonal road bumps for the film. The direction leaves much to be desired too; when the film veers into horror territory, with frequent off-screen kills and often incoherent action, it offers little of the original’s gripping tension. 

    None of it really makes sense – both the plot when you think about it (a couple of scenes feel like active plot holes in light of the killer’s identity) and the sheer fact this film got made. The original film is remembered for being a refreshingly uncomplicated slasher about the era’s biggest stars hooking up and getting hooked to death, so there’s not much of a tone or a vibe to replicate. Yet Robinson, a diehard fan, does her damndest, and the cast, in particular Gabbriette and Madelyn Cline, nicely evoke the original cast’s charisma and preternatural good looks. The whole effort is admirable in a surrealist way – there’s one dream sequence that feels like you’ve huffed paint – but this level of fealty to an IP probably isn’t healthy in the long term.





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