I’m not going to act like 1997’s Know What You Did Last Summer is a classic by any stretch of the imagination. Jim Gillespie’s whodunit slasher was an immediate product of the post-Scream horror landscape (Scream writer Kevin Williamson wrote it). Still, at the very least, it maintains a somewhat nostalgic charm as a time capsule for its cast of teen-movie royalty and the unique appeal of its hook-wearing black-coat killer. The same cannot be said for this 2025 semi-reboot/sequel of the same name. If anything, this requel proves why this time capsule should have stayed buried in the past.
Like the original, 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer takes place in Seaport, North Carolina. Our lead girl is Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), who has returned to the coastal town to celebrate her best friend Danica’s (Madelyn Cline) engagement to longtime beau Teddy (Tyriq Withers). Along the way, she even reconnects with her ex, Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), and her estranged friend, Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon). The five of them go off enjoying the 4th of July fireworks when Teddy accidentally causes a truck to swerve off the road, causing a fatal accident. The group cover up their involvement in the crash and make a vow of secrecy.
Sure enough, a year later, Danica receives a “I Know What You Did Last Summer” note, and even surer enough, the people around them start dying in a similar fashion to the previous installments. Ava and crew have to find out who knows their secret, and enlist the help of the two survivors of the original massacre –– Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.) –– to do so.
“If anything, this requel proves why this time capsule should have stayed buried in the past.”
Right off the bat, I knew something was off in the first few moments, and that’s entirely due to the awful dialogue in the screenplay co-written by Sam Laytin and director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. It’s hard to get attached to any of these main characters when they speak entirely in Gen-Z buzzwords rather than like human beings. I get that some of it is intentionally tongue-in-cheek, like an instance of a victim begging the killer to “take his crypto wallet”, but most of the humour instead comes across like the Steve Buscemi “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme. My audience was damn near silent aside from the occasional chuckle.
One aspect that I appreciated in that original I Know What You Did Last Summer was how the incident had clearly rattled the group in their everyday lives prior to the murders, like Sarah Michelle Gellar’s dashed hopes of stardom. The new film doesn’t even attempt to do the same thing. None of the characters–aside from Teddy– felt like their lives had been affected by the incident at all. The main cast are all varying shades of bland, with Chase Sui Wonders and Madelyn Cline bearing the least of the damage through their genuine chemistry as friends.
Additionally, as nice as it is to see Jennifer Love Hewitt on the big screen again, she’s barely given anything to work with at all. In the years since the first two films (the non-canonical, direct-to-video threequel I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer is thankfully ignored), Julie is now a college professor who speaks on trauma. She appears in a handful of scenes and is a non-factor for most of the film. Freddie Prinze Jr’s role is more substantive in terms of screen time, given his character still resides in Seaport, but not in terms of actual quality. They’re giving a dual version of the hardened vet that legacy horror characters become in these films, but without any sense of character beyond that.
“This interaction of I Know What You Did Last Summer is gorier than the previous installments, but none of the kills are really all that memorable.”
Robinson hints at potentially interesting thematic material, like Seaport’s gentrification over the years to cover up the past, or the repeating cycles of violence. Instead, they’re all either surface-level explorations, just forgotten about entirely, or repeating the worst parts of other legacy sequels. The moment a character/potential suspect announced themselves as the host of a true crime podcast obsessed with the original murders, I just about rolled my eyes out of my head.
Worst of all, I could forgive most of these things if the movie was in any way fun, but it simply isn’t. This interaction of I Know What You Did Last Summer is gorier than the previous installments, but none of the kills are really all that memorable. There’s even one that’s a wholesale copycat of the original Scream’s opening kill. There are only so many things you can do with either a hook or a harpoon before it gets stale quickly. Speaking of Scream, even the killer’s identity reveal is equal parts easily telegraphed, poorly explained and completely nonsensical.
There’s also a major switchup from how a lot of these legacy sequels usually go that I won’t spoil, but even that falls completely flat on its face almost immediately afterward. There is one instance where using the previous films’ iconography (the few that exist) goes in an interesting direction, only to pull back as a dream sequence. Even the mid-credits scene had more intentional laughs than the rest of the film.
Ultimately, I Know What You Did Last Summer has to be the horror reboot I’ve seen since Netflix’s godawful Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It begs the question of what the point of it even was. It’s not campy enough to be funny, it’s not scary enough to be thrilling, it’s not much of anything at all.
