How do you make a legacy sequel when you’re unsure what your legacy even is? That’s the question plaguing I Know What You Did Last Summer, director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s update of the 1997 slasher of the same name. Stuffed to the idiomatic gills with thudding callbacks, hoary one-liners, and phoned-in cameos, the film feels like the predictable endpoint of a trend toward empty nostalgia that’s run through all the big fish in horror cinema and is now coming to swallow up whatever might be left behind.
After the events of the summer that still haunt Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.), the North Carolina fishing village of Southport suffered an economic downturn, giving land developer Grant Spencer (Billy Campell) an opportunity to turn it into the “Hamptons of the South.” Among Southport’s new generation of rich young people is Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), who comes back from college to celebrate the engagement of her bestie, Danica (Madelyn Cline), to Grant’s son, Teddy (Tyriq Withers). Also in attendance are Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), who carries a torch for Ava, and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), who, following a traumatic event involving Ava’s father, now stands outside this inner circle.
When the group go joyriding to catch some Fourth of July fireworks, they inadvertently kill a motorist and lean on Teddy’s father’s connections to cover up the crime. But, wouldn’t you know it, the past refuses to stay buried, and the following summer the appearance of a familiar fisherman armed with a hook drives the film’s central fivesome to seek the help of the only survivors of the slicker-wearing maniac’s previous reign of terror.
It goes without saying that Scream rewrote the book on what horror cinema was and could be in the 1990s, bringing a meta-referential freshness that delighted an audience who was more literate about the genre’s tropes than ever before. The original I Know What You Did Last Summer is considered derivative of Scream, but Kevin Williamson wrote the former before the latter, and it was Scream’s monster success that got I Know What You Did Last Summer greenlit. As a spec script based on the 1973 young adult novel by Lois Duncan, I Know What You Did Last Summer, despite some snappy dialogue in its opening sections, feels like a much more old-school whodunnit than the film whose success it’s often accused of coasting on.
This is ironic, as Robinson’s take on the material is shamefully imitative of what Radio Silence has done with the 2020s Scream sequels and what David Gordon Green did with his Halloween trilogy. In short, this new I Know What You Did Last Summer is truly a copy of a copy.
As for the original film’s legacy, that’s pretty nebulous. It never had the personality of Scream, and its inessential follow-up, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, ensured that the series wouldn’t have the legs either. What the first film did have, though, was a quartet of the hottest talent at the time, and a sense of place, thanks to it actually being shot in North Carolina. (This reboot was shot in Australia and Los Angeles.) There’s a ghost of a good idea in how the film evolves Southport, and the climax raises questions about the erasing of legacy within the text, but it’s neither smart nor insightful enough to note how the same faceless corporatization of the town at its center is eating the movie alive from the inside out.
The film consistently overestimates our investment in the older characters while failing to give us new ones worth caring about. Even worse, there are attempts to mimic the ultramodern snap of Williamson’s dialogue, but Robinson and co-writer Sam Lansky lean too hard on the isms of chronically online Gen-zers, which hit the ear wrong and date the film even as it unspools before us. Most unforgivable of all, though, is that there are no great kill sequences.
Late in this reboot, a character states “Nostalgia is overrated,” and it feels like an indictment of the film we’ve been watching. Far from making a case for the original I Know What You Did Last Summer as one with its own identity and a legacy worth turning over, Robinson’s update is so cynically made and self-indulgent that it will at least leave you respecting the workmanlike scare-making that director Jim Gillespie brought to the 1997 film.
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