'I Know What You Did Last Summer' - Mediocre Post Scream slasher... again.

Josh
Sep 4, 2025
5 min read

Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (2025)

Bet you forgot this franchise existed, didn't ya...

Well, the horror genre is dead; it has been replaced by highbrow psychological thrillers. Was the consensus back in the 90s. Slashers had saturated horror and were not pulling in the money they used to. While on the rise were classy crime thrillers such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Se7en (1995), and Jacob's Ladder (1990). Then a bloody Myers catalogue scrolled on screen, bringing a sexy young look to the slasher genre. Scream (1996). Following were a bunch of young, hot horror stars, including those from Scream, Urban Legend (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Craft (1996), Halloween: 20 Years Later (1998), and then I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). And, not to mention, all the sequels that followed these. And watching I Know What You Did Last Summer in recent years, it’s pretty generic. It feels like it took the most generic slasher villain possible, playing off the Lovers Lane urban legend. Second to a serial killer in a hockey mask with a chainsaw. So when the trailer for a reboot dropped, I couldn’t tell you a single person who was jumping up and down for joy. And when the trailer had returning actors Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt, I was confused. How bottom of the barrel are they scrapping to repeat the same plot and have legacy characters go through the same thing? It felt like a boardroom choice. And after seeing the movie. It felt like a boardroom choice.

*I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025). Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.*

The movie wastes no time triggering the inciting incident when a group of friends reunite for an engagement party. We have very little time with each character. Our lead, Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), alludes to a dead mother who doesn’t affect anything. However, she will also reunite with an old high school flame, Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), which will have little to no impact on the story. High School sweethearts who had the most interesting dynamic, Danica (Madelyn Cline) and Teddy (Tyriq Withers). And lastly, the outcast Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), who has very little to do. But before you know it, they’re running cars off cliffs and covering up murders. Speaking of, the execution of the inciting incident plays out similarly but worse than the original. In the original, there felt like there was more of a recklessness and active participation in the hit and run. While in the remake, they managed to avoid going to the police due to Mayor-level nepotism via Teddy, having the victim swerve off the road felt more like an accident. They actively tried to help pull the victim out of the car. So off the bat, I felt like I didn’t witness a murder, but rather just some lazy kids. In fact, in this, they look more like a bunch of assholes, as they just didn’t want to contact the authorities. And in the original, it made more sense that they didn’t want to go to the police because they actually hit the person.

Jumping ahead a year later, Ave has gone off the rails, looking like an alt-lite E-girl, and we have no idea what Milo was doing. I guess committing man-slaughter did nothing to him mentally. And Danica and Teddy are separated, with Teddy being unhinged off-camera because he seems reasonably stable when we catch up with him again. We just see the clichéd, let's scatter beer bottles everywhere to show that he’s nuts.

While Danica is already getting engaged again. While Stevie is doing the same thing, almost no change there. Then we are introduced to our legacy characters, where these soft reboot remakes tend to make them the most boring and somewhat pathetic, stuck-in-the-past characters. Freddie Prinze Jr., as Ray, is stuck in the past, wanting the town to constantly remember the miserable events of the first movie (and maybe the second movie, I can’t remember anything from that). While Jennifer Love Hewitt returns as Julie, who comes across as a sane person who’s left town to escape the past, only to be dragged back into events that unfolded the same way 28 years ago.

Spoilers.

If the movie wasn’t generic enough, the twist of who the villain was has two layers of predictability. As they start to discover the family ties to the person they murdered, the killer is revealed to be our loner Stevie, which isn’t a surprise if you’ve watched enough Scream movies. But then, if you’ve paid attention to how people have defended themselves, once the revelation happens, you instantly think, “Oh, they are ripping off Scream even more, so there’s another killer.” And then you realise you missed your calling in life, being a part of the mystery gang alongside power couple Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr., because he is the killer. Having this as a twist was something I thought was interesting, on a meta level. Where the character is still holding on and wanting people to continuously remember the past, so he’s reviving the events himself. However, at the point at which it was revealed, I was pretty checked out. It didn’t feel satisfying, and all I could see when looking at the scene was a committee of producers saying, “What’s gonna really shock the audience?”

As mentioned, they almost doomed themselves by making this a soft reboot because the idea of having the same events happen again is stupid. But it also makes this town feel dead between movies. In the last 28 years, has there never been another murder or case of manslaughter? An accident? But this one event triggered a series of murders again. With the same killer. Honestly, I feel like it would be less lazy to just do a straight remake. The return of the legacy characters made it feel clunky.

Visually, the film does nothing that has stuck with me since I’ve seen it. Both in terms of presentation and kills. One has stuck out in my mind where a character is getting shot with a harpoon gun from the dark void of the outside. Kills were as bland as you could get, where the only gore came from the aftermath of the kill. Which mostly consists of people getting hung like fish outside of a building. This happens numerous times. Shots are bland with the visual energy of a soap opera. With even lighting across the board and bland medium shots and repetition of close-ups during conversations. If you’ve seen a movie, then you can picture this one in your head before you’ve seen it.

I don’t want to say we’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel, bring back I Know What You Did Last Summer, because we haven’t seen a remake of Species yet. But if you haven’t clocked in already, the early signs of the collapse of civilisation are what’s popular in the artistic sense. If it’s got any depth to what it’s showing, is it regurgitating what we’ve already seen, and this movie was alarming in that portion of my brain. Which hit its peak with sequel bait at the end. If you’re desperate to see a fisherman with a fishhook kill a bunch of teens, take a trip back to the 90s. At least it was shot in Sydney, Australia. That was pretty cool, I guess.