“I Know What You Did Last Summer” - Still?

With the success (I use this term loosely) of the Scream franchise’s reboot, and the profitability of scary movies in general, it was inevitable that another bygone horror franchise would be brought back from the dead. Afterall, horror movies are almost always cheap to make, people never get horror movie fatigue, and nostalgia is a powerful box office force. Or so I’m told.

I’m sure that’s what the studio executives were thinking when they assigned a random intern to go dumpster diving in their subterranean landfill of DVD cases. When that intern stumbled across a battered copy of I Know What You Did Last Summer, they excitedly ran to the executive suite, threw the DVD at the leather chair facing the window, then Uber’d to their college campus to change majors. And that is how reboots get made. Or so I’m told.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is an obvious choice to resurrect...if the target audience is people who were teenagers in the 1990s who still have bad taste in movies. The original I Know What You Did Last Summer was not particularly well-liked by critics (43% positive rating) and pulled in only $125 million. Its sequel plummeted to a 10% critical rating and $84 million box office, effectively killing the franchise. A direct-to-DVD sequel in 2006 and short-lived Amazon Prime series in 2021 served only to prove that people really didn’t like the franchise. Yet, here we are in 2025 with another requel (I will always hate the writers of Scream 5 for coining that term).

Rebooting a 1990s horror franchise isn’t the only lesson I Know What You Did Last Summer took from the Scream reboot. Like Scream 5, I Know What You Did Last Summer is very much a remake of the original but also a sequel (in this case, to the second film - I Still Know What You Did Last Summer), brings back the original survivors, all but puts a nametag on the killer early in the film, and isn’t scary at all.

In case you weren’t a teenager in the 1990s and never saw it, the original film’s plot was that a group of young people accidentally ran over a guy with their car, tried to cover it up, then were systematically murdered a year later by a killer seeking revenge who knew what they had done. This remake has the exact same plot but dumbs down the setup so much that even the Fast and Furious writers are shaking their heads in incredulity.

This time, reunited friends Danica (Madelyn Cline), Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) are watching fireworks from the side of a road on a cliff with a blind curve. A car comes speeding around the bend, swerves to avoid hitting Teddy, crashes into the guard rail, and plummets to the ground below. Teddy calls 9-1-1, then convinces the group that they need to leave before the cops and paramedics show up. But why? Even if they were worried they could be blamed, the obvious lie is to just tell the cops the car was speeding around the curve and lost control, simply leaving out the part where Teddy was standing in the road. They even tried to stop the car from falling when it was teetering on the cliff’s edge. Not only is this a scenario where fleeing the scene and keeping it a secret makes no sense, talking to the cops and fibbing would have strengthened the killer’s motivation.

Speaking of the killer, wow was it obvious early on who the killer was. I won’t tell you why or how, but it’s nearly impossible to miss. The only real question is if there is just one killer or multiple killers. Scratch that, two questions. The other question is why does this movie feature exactly no scary scenes whatsoever?

The original I Know What You Did Last Summer was a straight slasher flick. It went for scares. The remake tried to reinvent itself more as a comedy horror, but forgot to tell most of the actors about the comedy part and forgot to add elements that make horror movies frightening. The result was a very non-scary contrast of Wonders, Pidgeon, and Freddie Prinze Jr. taking the movie way too seriously, Hauer-King and Jennifer Love Hewitt phoning it in, and Cline and Withers stealing every scene because they got the memo about the comedy part.

Yes, Hewitt and Prinze Jr. return and in their original roles. Sarah Michelle Geller returns as well, but only in a dream sequence. Which is a shame because she also nailed the comedy part in her one scene.

By the time the credits rolled - including a very predictable mid-credit scene - the only question I had was how much of the movie’s entertainment value was intentional. Many in the audience had fun watching it, but I think it’s because they saw it in a packed audience. Given the bad screenplay, laughably stupid dialogue, lack of frights or thrills, and mostly bad performances, it’s the kind of movie that typical leaves audiences grumbling. I think Cline was so fun to watch that she lifted an otherwise lackluster movie to the kind of movie you watch with a bunch of friends, a bunch of alcohol, and a bunch of running commentary. Which is how the entire franchise should be watched. Still.

Rating: Ask for sixteen dollars back. Or so I’m told.