2025 | rated R | starring Chase Sui Wonders, Madelyn Cline, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Billy Campbell, Freddie Prinze Jr. | directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson | 1 hr 51 mins | 1 out of 5 stars |
2025 Halloween Horrorfest #8
Of all the movies to get the Scream 5 “requel” treatment, the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise is the most bizarre. Maybe I’m not the guy to write this, because I hated this movie back in 1997 and I have no nostalgia for it now. The original IKWYDLS came about in the post-Scream slasher movie revival of the 90s and it understood Scream about as well as all the post-Seinfeld knock-off sitcoms about 30-something singles in New York understood Seinfeld. Strip Scream of everything that makes it clever, fun, satirical and thrilling and you get this by-the-numbers slasher movie with a cast of 20-somethings playing deeply unlikable teenagers running from a hook-handed villain in a fisherman’s slicker. The reverence for which the 2025 I Know What You Did Last Summer bestows on that 1997 film, treating it as iconic and memorable as movies like Scream V, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The First Omen treat their original films, is hilarious.
In the beachside town of Southport, a group of friends get together for Danica’s (Madelyn Cline) engagement party during the 4th of July weekend. When they stop to watch fireworks, a car careens around the corner, misses them and goes over the side of the cliff. Pause. Yes, that’s all that happens. Right off the bat, this new group doesn’t cause the accident with their recklessness or selfishness, they simply don’t help in a scenario where the car is in such danger, and the occupant is so obviously dead at the bottom of a cliff that it wouldn’t matter. So what they’ve done is not even that bad, but a year later at Danica’s next engagement party for her new fiancé (ok, that’s a cute gag), she gets a threatening note, and her friends start dying one by one at the hook hand of The Fisherman.
Some movies are bad because they have a central premise that doesn’t make sense or doesn’t stretch into a film. Some movies are bad because of the choices made to take the overall story. Last Summer 2025 is death by a thousand cuts. Every scene, every character interaction, almost every line of dialog and choice in the story direction is baffling nonsense. Nowhere is it more apparent than here that I Know What You Did Last Summer has no identity as a franchise. It’s a straight slasher movie that kind of assumes the identity of whatever it wants and reinvents what it is as it goes along. A big part of this reboot is Southport itself. That the town itself possesses some sort of evil and the mayor (Billy Campbell of all people) and sheriff are trying to keep quiet. Keep the beaches open, this is Jaws now, people.
Then our heroes, Ava (Chase Sui Wonders, The Studio) and Danica chase down Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) at the college where she teaches PTSD and she tells them how to survive this guy, like it’s the same one that went after them in 1997 and there are a set of “rules” to surviving him. Again, let’s go back to Scream, which made the clever decision to turn the events of the movies into an in-universe movie series itself which would inspire future copycat killers. No such thing exists in the Last Summer universe, but everyone runs around acting like this is a copycat killer from those famous murders 20 years ago. There is a true crime angle the movie taps on centering around a podcaster who comes to town to talk about the murders, but that story ends before it begins.
As the movie winds into its third act, writer/director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (of the cute Do Revenge) botches one reveal after another. She shows us a picture that points to someone being the killer before what should be the big reveal – when they pull the hood off and reveal themselves. Then there is twist after twist that I won’t go into here, but one that baffled me as a non-fan of this franchise and should infuriate fans of the franchise. It makes no sense, for the character, for the story, nothing. The one-liners are terrible, each one showing the characters coming away with the most absurd take-aways. After surviving a mass murder one character quips “F**k the 4th of July”. That’s your take-away. Another quips that all this happened because “men don’t go to therapy” after the reveal of a female killer. Then another person quips that “People are always trying to kill that woman” like this is all some winking meta-parody. It’s even down to the ending, where the camera frames up the road so it starts to look like a hook and then botches that shot too.
For an R-rated slasher movie, IKWYDLS is remarkably bloodless. This movie is very much catering to gen-Z. Very safe, not too much blood, not too much violence, no likable characters killed off so you don’t feel anything. Nothing honest, everything irony poisoned. Not any sex or nudity, and the sex scene we do see is a choking scene. In fact, everyone in this movie looks like they just stepped out of an amateur internet porno video. I’ve never seen a cast of “sexy young people” in a polished studio film looks so sun-blistered, spray-tanned, acne-scarred and dark-root bleached-blonde in my life. Hollywood is waging a war on beauty and this movie is charging to the front line giving their lead actors the most unflattering outfits, make-up, hair design and lighting you could imagine. I’m not saying everyone needs to be a supermodel, I’m saying this movie is doing deliberate things to make these actors look this way and I should be wincing more at the kills than the lead actor’s faces. A bit catty, but hey.
But make-up and hair does not kill a movie. A painful script, scattershot direction, terrible acting and a baffling third act certainly do though. A slasher movie that doesn’t want to be a slasher movie sure doesn’t work either. Remember that big iconic scene from the first film, no, because there aren’t any. Not everything from our childhood is iconic. Hopefully I Know What You Did Last Summer is dead and buried for good now.