I Know What You Did Last Summer
Twenty-eight years later, the macabre murders of Southport, North Carolina, start repeating, targeting folk with poor peripheral vision.
Murder by numbers: Sarah Pidgeon, Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders
Image courtesy of Sony Pictures.
Freddie Prinze Jr’s character wasn’t that bright in the 1997 version of I Know What You Did Last Summer. Here, in the sequel to the 1998 sequel, his bar owner Ray Bronson is back and gets to utter, reassuringly, “nothing bad is going to happen! Do you hear me?” It’s not something you should say out loud in a slasher film, particularly when the bodies pile up as high as an elephant’s eye. It’s been 28 years since a group of privileged, inordinately attractive young people were terrorised by a killer in a fisherman’s slicker wielding a hook with its own musical scale.
Unlike the other horror reboots of late, I Know What You Did Last Summer doesn’t have a novel or clever idea in its muddled head. Five inordinately attractive ex-college friends high on life, alcohol and weed, accidentally cause a fatal crash, sending a 1990s’ Dodge Ram pickup truck off a coastal cliff. It’s astonishing how au fait young people are with the model and year of the vehicles around them. Nonetheless, they didn’t mean to do it, and owning up to the police about the incident could prove problematic. So they call the emergency services and hightail it out of dodge. Then, a year later, back in the coastal town of Southport, North Carolina, Danica (Madelyn Cline) receives a note at her bridal shower inscribed in blood with the words ‘I know what you did last summer.’ Who? What? How? !!! Let the slaying commence…
The scriptwriters Sam Lansky and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson tie themselves up in knots trying to thrash their way through the undergrowth of improbable cliché in which the morally-challenged quintet and their friends are targeted by a slow-moving figure in a raincoat and an ability to appear out of nowhere at any given moment. The first film has been updated to include sick social media and podcasts and a reference to Bessel van der Kolk’s cult bestseller The Body Keeps the Score, but otherwise the ludicrous remains the same. There’s a touch of BDSM here, a snatch of lesbian snogging there, and a suggestion of corruption in Establishment bodies, but what the film lacks is logic, plausibility and pizzazz. Meanwhile, everybody looks unimaginably jacked and collagen-fed, regardless of their age and calling, with even a hot priest in the form of the creepy Pastor Judah (Austin Nichols).
One should welcome a mainstream Hollywood movie directed, edited, photographed, designed and scored by women, but only if the film exhibits an ounce of originality or style. This one is heavy-handed and quite boring, with the suggestion of more to come a dispiriting mid-final-credit shock.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers, Sarah Pidgeon, Billy Campbell, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Gabbriette Bechtel, Austin Nichols, Brandy Norwood, Joshua Orpin, Georgia Flood.
Dir Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, Pro Neal H. Moritz, Screenplay Sam Lansky and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, Ph Elisha Christian, Pro Des Courtney Andujar and Hillary Andujar, Ed Saira Haider, Music Chanda Dancy, Costumes Mari-An Ceo, Sound Ando Johnson.
Columbia Pictures/Screen Gems/Original Film-Sony Pictures.
111 mins. USA. 2025. UK and US Rel: 18 July 2025. Cert. 15.
