Flasz On Film

In 1997, I Know What You Did Last Summer came out as the “two” part of the 90s Slasher Revival movement one-two punch, less than a year after the Wes Craven-directed Scream and mere months before its sequel, Scream 2. All three were written by Kevin Williamson, one of its co-instigators and leading voices, alongside Wes Craven. He did some uncredited rewrites on Halloween H2O and wrote The Faculty, the Robert Rodriguez-directed contribution to the short-lived micro trend. Craven, for his part, also planted the seed for it with his final take on the Freddy Krueger franchise, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.  

And there are many ways you could now—from the vantage point of nearly three decades after— find faults with this movie, since despite being one of the earliest entries, it feels decidedly derivative and nowhere near as intrinsically engaging as the Scream movies. I suppose it lacked a good enough hook (pun intended) the Craven movies had with their meta-appeal. But the movie mostly worked as a Scooby-Doo slasher with a recognizable and fresh enough main antagonist and a cast of young starlets populating the frame (Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Philippe, Freddie Prinze Jr and Johnny Galecki). It honestly didn’t matter that the central conceit of a group of high school seniors being hunted down one by one by a man in a fisherman’s outfit with a fishhook and cruel intentions, presumably because he knew what they did last summer, was shoddily put together at best. But as one of the first to do it, the novelty gave it a pass. 

The situation is starkly different now, in 2025, as the new incarnation of the series, also titled I Know What You Did Last Summer, can no longer enjoy the privilege of being there first and having the latitude to do simple and obvious things in an effort to refresh and restart the series. After all, the nostalgia-powered resurrection of the 90s slasher revival trend has been in effect for seven years now—dating back to the release of David Gordon Green’s Halloween and when Samara Weaving took on her in-laws in the eat-the-rich hack-and-slash Ready or Not. Between now and then we have seen two instalments of the resurrected Scream series, a bunch of Fear Street movies on Netflix, a requisite add-on to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, Abigail, Thanksgiving, and a bunch more I am now forgetting.  

Happy Death Day! That’s another one. And its sequel. And Heart Eyes. See? The market for newly dusted nostalgia-driven slashers winking at the 90s is pretty crowded already.  

Nevertheless, just as no economic upheaval ever stopped a war in progress, no Hollywood studio ever let a little thing like market saturation get in the way of milking a cash cow. By hook or by crook, they did it. They asked around to see what the playbook for legacy sequel was in this neck of the woods, and by Jove, they followed the formula to the letter.  

Thus, I Know What You Did Last Summer (edition 2025) does exactly what you’d expect a legacy sequel in this series would do. It’s a de facto remake of the 1997 with a handful of legacy characters (Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr., the only two survivors of the Southport killing spree) mixed into the cast of mostly unknown starlets of predominantly TV-derived pedigree. A group of friends get together, in the same town as the original, go out to see the fireworks in the middle of the road, cause a fatal car crash and decide to lie about it to avoid jail time. One year later, they begin receiving letters suggesting that—surprise, surprise—someone knows what they did last summer and shortly thereafter people begin dropping like flies. This time, however, the intrepid quintuplet of protagonists (Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers, Sarah Pidgeon) are emboldened to play the game of amateur Scooby-Doo as they attempt to evade the killer with a massive hook, because they have access to Julie James (Love Hewitt) who knows all about knowing what kind of trouble doing something dodgy last summer might put you in, but with none of the charm and double the body count.  

In short, the movie doesn’t offer anything new, nor does it capitalize very well on any kind of nostalgia one could have for the original. Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, who co-wrote and directed the movie, flanked by her collaborators Leah McKendrick and Sam Lansky clearly placed all their eggs in one basket and thought that quickly rushing together a movie executing the formula—as Scream 5 and Scream VI did so effectively—would be enough. But they don’t even acknowledge—let alone address—the elephant in the room: the original movie they’re resurrecting didn’t have much meat on the bone to begin with. 

And you can see it clearly in living colour how this year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer lacks the punch Scream 5 and Halloween enjoyed thanks to the return of Neve Campbell and Jamie Lee Curtis, respectively. Furthermore, the killer iconography in this series, despite its best intentions, just cannot hold a candle to the iconic Ghostface, let alone that classic Michael Myers visage that propelled the David Gordon Green movies into becoming a trilogy. It’s just not the same. And consequently, because there’s not much in this movie that you can fawn over while reminiscing about the 90s, all you have left is the admittedly enjoyable process of nitpicking the plot, characterizations and numerous conveniences; which is a recipe for a disaster because the success of any slasher is highly dependent on sufficient suspension of disbelief. After all, the genre was built on the solid foundation of characters running upstairs instead of outside, screaming at the top of their lungs instead of legging it like Usain Bolt, or hanging out by themselves after dark at the cemetery, inspecting creepy-looking warehouses and taking baths with headphones on to conveniently fail to hear people being slaughtered downstairs like animals, which are fundamentally nitpickable.

Truthfully, there is no logical way for anyone to defend this movie’s reason to exist other than to acknowledge that the filmmakers had the property on their books and needed to act quickly, which is kind of why I believe The First Omen exists. Admittedly, the movie has its moments, and a few sequences come across as fun enough to be passable, like the scene with the hand-powered lift loosely acknowledging the original or the first kill of the movie, but most of it is all but forgettable. Granted, you can probably extract a conversation about gentrification from between the lines of the script, which is something that Nia DaCosta’s Candyman did much better (while also inadvertently commenting on its own existence too) a few years back.  

But that’s mostly it. The entire movie feels like the kind of homework you’d put together at the last minute before having to run out the door not to miss the school bus. Rushed, barely legible, fundamentally incoherent. Why does Julie James at some point quip that “nostalgia’s overrated”? You tell me. Especially because a mere thirty minutes earlier she is found using the title of the movie in a sentence without a shred of camp awareness I’d expect from a nostalgia sequel of this sort. I sure got it from the Scream movies.  

I’m sorry but the movie mostly doesn’t work and the bits of it that do only do so because the preceding franchise is there to provide them with a heartbeat. As it stands, I Know What You Did Last Summer is going to serve as a great example that you either need to have a good enough idea to bring a franchise back from the dead or at least make sure that the series itself can live on its own clout in the absence of everything else. This here just does not.  

Repetitive, derivative and mostly ineffective, it is an open invitation to poke holes through the narrative made of damp toilet paper—falling apart the moment you even glance at it. And this is not the kind of movie you’d want to allow to be made fun of because the act of doing so is unlikely to turn it into a “so bad that it’s good” experience. In fact, it would have been a better call to turn it into a legacy sequel in the Scary Movie franchise and let the filmmakers lean on humour in a much more determined manner. Maybe it would have worked better if it had been titled I Just Remembered What You Did That Summer Thirty Years Ago.