Of all the bad horror-movie sequels out there, few embrace their badness more insistently than I Know What You Did Last Summer. That might sound like good schlocky fun, but I assure you it’s not. Yes, studio horror often requires a certain level of playfulness — how else to sell all those poor character decisions, all that unnecessary gore, all those ludicrous twists — but the ones that work still have something true at their core, something that sticks in your mind. Another one of these simultaneous reboot-slash-follow-ups, this new film presents us with a scenario roughly similar to the 1997 original, which had a group of teens in a picturesque fishing town called Southport being hunted down by a psychotic, hook-wielding fisherman the summer after they unwittingly ran over a mysterious pedestrian and secretly dumped the body.
Only this time, they don’t run over anybody! They’re hanging out in the middle of the road at the notorious turn known as Reaper’s Curve one night when a car screeches to avoid them and winds up plummeting into the sea; they even try to help the guy as the car initially hangs precariously on the edge of the cliff. Later, they feel bad about the fact that they didn’t do more, and whoever’s hunting them down clearly thinks they’re responsible for this person’s death. And look, they obviously shouldn’t have done what they did, but the picture effectively lets them off the hook (so to speak) right away. This muddying of the central characters’ culpability is fatal to the whole enterprise.
The initial I Know What You Did Last Summer wasn’t exactly a great movie, but it got a lot of mileage out of its atmosphere and the genuine sense of guilt that loomed over these teens. They all looked famously amazing, but they were not exactly likable. And with performances straight from the open-your-mouth-and-windmill-your-arms school of horror acting, they weren’t particularly convincing as victims either. But we did buy that they had indeed done something terrible the summer before, which in turn made them vulnerable, maybe even relatable. (Guilt and shame are the most universal of emotions; just look at how many religions are founded on them.) It was the age of high concept, and this was as high concept as they came.
This might seem like a minor quibble, but the fact that the new movie botches the whole wait-what-did-they-actually-do-last-summer thing speaks to a prevailing sense of laziness. (Maybe even cowardice: Are the filmmakers so worried that if our heroes did something genuinely bad, sensitive modern audiences might not go along for the ride? That feels like the wrong way to go about making something called I Know What You Did Last Summer.) The script tries to turn its self-aware clumsiness into a virtue, opening with protagonist Eva (Chase Sui Wonders), having returned home to Southport for her best friend Danica’s (Madelyn Cline) engagement party, checking out dresses while monologuing exposition to herself in the mirror about her past with the characters we’re about to meet.
People do a lot of announcing in this movie, proclaiming (for our benefit, presumably) everything from the state of their former relationships to what they’re going to do to the killer. They don’t really ever back any of it up. Even after people start getting offed, the film’s sense of urgency remains mild. At the height of the murdery shenanigans, one guy goes to a sauna. I suppose this could be wink-wink hilarious, but here it comes off mostly as poor storytelling. It also comes off as contempt for the characters. Whether it’s the rich lunkhead (Tyriq Withers) whose bizarre roadside antics help set things in motion, or the dead-eyed true-crime podcaster (Gabbriette Bechtel) who comes to Southport with the intent of doing an episode on the events of 1997, or Danica, the pampered beauty queen who can’t seem to hold a single thought in her head for more than five seconds, the film presents us with such a panoply of paper-thin Zoomer fecklessness, complete with nonstop contempo-slang, it’s hard to take any of it seriously. The youngs are not this annoying in real life, but for some reason, Hollywood keeps trying to convince us they are.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
That might be the point. It probably is. Director Jennifer Katyn Robinson (Do Revenge) clearly enjoys fusing ’90s nostalgia with modish, self-referential satire. So maybe the real culprit is the attempt to manhandle her sensibility into a studio-horror sequel. The film never achieves the comic energy required to justify such an approach. (There’s certainly potential there: One person gets killed trying to charge their phone, and that should be very funny.) It’s like Bodies Bodies Bodies with a lot less irony — that is to say, it’s torture. At least the returning veterans provide a bit of flavor: Freddie Prinze Jr. has become a more compelling actor in his grizzled middle age, and it’s always nice to see Jennifer Love Hewitt again, though her Julie James, now a professor, is here mainly to provide an obvious lecture on how “trauma changes the brain.” With lines like that, you could probably make a case for this whole thing being a satire on modern horror, but if so, it’s a frustratingly half-hearted and unnecessary one. It’s not enough of a spoof to distinguish itself, and modern horror already satirizes itself fairly effectively.
As for the thrills, forget about it. The modern jump scare has already been degraded through misuse and abuse, with filmmakers taking it on as a technical challenge rather than a dramatic one. They lower the ambient sound, build anticipation, then boom. Our bodies respond to this, so we get bilked into thinking we’re being legitimately scared. This I Know What You Did Last Summer is more egregious than most, especially since that hooded, hook-wielding fisherman remains such a promising monster, a figure straight out of a nightmare; there’s so much more that can be done with him. Over and over, though, the movie blows it. It also tries to make up for its lack of clever scares by introducing screeching flashbacks now and then. Our ears get a workout, but our minds just dissolve further. Not scary enough to thrill, funny enough to charm, or clever enough to convince, I Know What You Did Last Summer isn’t just forgettable. It’s actively irritating.
