I Know What You Did Last Summer review – cramped by the limitations of its own IP

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. 

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.