“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.

“The Little Mermaid (2023)” - The Voice.

With the release of the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, Disney will almost assuredly see its last billion-dollar box office remake of a beloved classic. Like The Lion King, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast before it, The Little Mermaid will benefit from my generation reminiscing about the good ol’ late 1980s and early 1990s. Among the many things we remember as children during that time was enjoying the animated film renaissance that began with The Little Mermaid in 1989. No price is too high to pay to try to recapture that feeling.

In terms of Disney animated movies people will pay to see remade, those four are gimmes while the rest are a coin flip, if not a straight *raspberry noise.* Remakes of Alice in Wonderland and The Jungle Book wound up around $1 billion at the box office and it goes downhill fast after that. Think I’m exaggerating? Name the Disney animated feature that was released immediately prior to the original The Little Mermaid. Or immediately after the original The Lion King, for that matter. Exactly. My cousin remembers Oliver & Company in 1988 and few remember Pocahontas in 1995. And none of them want to see a live-action remake of either of them. The upcoming Snow White & the Seven Dwarves has a chance, but I’ll take the under.

Because Disney wanted to make sure they got every last dollar out of our nostalgia with zero risk, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King were near carbon copies of the originals. Wouldn’t want to offend our inner children, right? The Little Mermaid is no different. There are slight tweaks to a few of the familiar scenes, as well as a couple new scenes featuring new songs (from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Alan Menken). And much to our chagrin, they cut out the scene where Chef Louis tries to cook Sebastian while singing “Les Poissons.” But the rest of the film is exactly how we remember it.

As with the other three “big four” movies, The Little Mermaid suffers from not being animated, losing much of the charm from the original. It’s weird to say that about a movie that is stuffed full of CGI, but here we are. It’s not that they couldn’t have recaptured it, but one reason they don’t is that they keep making the same bad decision to make the animals look as real as possible. In the animated versions, all of the creatures are drawn with human characteristics - eyebrows and human mouths, for example - in order for them to be more expressive.

Take Flounder for example. We don’t have to hear what cartoon Flounder is saying to know whether he is happy, sad, scared, or determined. It’s right there on his face. Conversely, CGI Flounder is an expressionless fish who emotes exclusively through dialogue. When we describe an actor as wooden, CGI Flounder epitomizes that description. To be fair, Scuttle (the seagull) and Sebastian (the crab) come off a lot better than Flounder does. But, Scuttle and Sebastian have the advantage of jointed limbs and charismatic actors voicing them (Awkwafina and Daveed Diggs, respectively) to cover for the lack of human facial traits. Sebastian also has cartoonish eyes that provide a bit of additional expression, which proves that the other characters could also have been embellished with CGI.

On the human side, Javier Bardem’s King Triton is about as wooden as they come. Sure, Bardem looks like he’s expressing the same emotions we saw 1989 Triton exhibit, but he’s not convincing at all. Look no further than the scene where Triton destroys Ariel’s treasure room. We’re supposed to believe he’s in a rage, but that’s just the laser-shooting trident talking. Triton seems mostly just annoyed in the same way I am when my son won’t put down his iPad and clean up his dishes. Maybe if I had a magic trident...

The other three main actors gave solid performance, though again, nothing that really stands out. If anything, they seem to be doing everything in their power to mimic their predecessors. Halle Bailey (Ariel) has a gorgeous singing voice and sounds very much like a sixteen-year-old girl. Jonah Hauer-King (Prince Eric) looks like what a CGI version of animated Prince Eric would look like, while delivering perhaps the sincerest performance of anyone in the film. Finally, we have Melissa McCarthy delivering an Ursula that is such a spot-on impression of Pat Carroll (the original voice of Ursula) that I’d believe McCarthy literally has the soul of Carroll possessing her.

When it comes to remakes, The Little Mermaid is among the better remakes, though it’s also among the less interesting. The CGI effects and scenery are breathtakingly gorgeous, especially the aesthetics of the mer-people. The story and its beats are identical to the original, which is good for those who’ve never seen the original and comforting at best for those who have. You’ll find yourself happily singing along with the old songs, but instantly forgetting all but one of the new songs (“The Scuttlebutt” sung by Diggs and Awkwafina). And there is somehow fifty-three more minutes of new movie that adds absolutely nothing to the story, not even a subplot. All of that put together leaves your nostalgia intact unless you really, really miss hearing “Les Poissons.”

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back because you knew Disney would play this one straight.