Bodies Bodies Bodies
My thoughts on I Know What You Did Last Summer
Long ago back in the mists of time—okay, the fall of 1997–Roger Ebert concluded his review of the silly slasher film I Know What You Did Last Summer by revealing “After the screening was over and the lights went up, I observed a couple of my colleagues in deep and earnest conversation, trying to resolve twists in the plot. They were applying more thought to the movie than the makers did.” As it so happens, I was actually of those colleagues trying to collate all the loose ends all—the name of the other guy is, sadly, lost to those aforementioned mists of time. Sadly, he did not live to witness the sequel/reboot to that film, also called I Know What You Did Last Summer, but if he had, there is the distinct possibility that he might have seen me once again trying to make sense of the senseless, though I suspect that I would have thrown in the towel much earlier so as not to waste any more brain cells than necessary on one of the most useless movies of the entire summer.
Once again we are back in Southport, the North Carolina fishing village where the catch of the day is always red herrings and the appearance of severed body parts is only rarely due to errant fireworks, though the place is now being positioned by local developer Grant Spencer (Billy Campbell) as the “Hamptons of the South.” Once again, a group of friends—rich ditz Ava (Madelyn Cline), her fiancée (and Grant’s spoiled son) Teddy (Tariq Withers), Danica’s BFF Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), nice-guy-with-a-thing-for-Ava Milo (Jonah Hauer King) and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), who used to hang with them until a vaguely alluded-to tragic event sent her in a different direction—have decided to go joyriding one night and inadvertently cause another motorist to drive their car over a cliff. Once again, they flee the scene (though Ava has some apprehensions) and use Teddy’s connections through his father to cover up their the crime and their involvement before going their separate way.
Once again (and I am just going to stop it with that), the scene shifts to a year later where the troubled Ava returns to town for Danica’s bridal shower—she and Teddy have broken up in the interim and she is newly affianced—and finds that Milo is still moony for her and Stevie has taking over the best friend duties. During the gift-giving, Danica receives an anonymous that once again (sorry) says “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and before too long, the bodies start piling up again as yet another person equipped with a rain slicker, a giant hook and—innovation time—a spear gun starts hacking their way through a number of ancillary characters before focusing on the gang themselves. Dimly recalling that something almost exactly like this happened in Southport nearly 30 years ago, they decide to look up the two survivors of that particular slaughter—Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), who now teaches college classes about overcoming trauma, and her now ex-husband Ray Bronson (Freddie Prince Jr.), who now runs the local bar—to seek their advice on how to avoid being filleted while trying to uncover who is trying to kill them and why.
Although some have attempted to reclaim the original I Know What You Did Last Summer as some kind of cult favorite, it was a remarkably dopey movie whose success could be attributed almost entirely to the combination of being the first major knockoff of the blockbuster Scream—a film that managed to wittily deconstruct the entire slasher genre while at the same time working as a genuinely inspired example of it—to emerge from the gate and to the prominent cleavage displayed by Hewitt and co-star Sarah Michelle Gellar. Since the Scream franchise was successfully revived (at least from a commercial perspective) in 2022 with the cunningly titled Scream, it should not come as surprise that I Know What You Did Last Summer would follow that film’s template with a narrative that basically retells the same story as the original, only this time with a new group of hot young faces for the target audience and callbacks and appearances from legacy cast members for those viewers old enough to have seen the original and dumb enough not to have learned their lesson the first time around.
As bad as the 1997 version was (not to mention the ludicrous 1998 cash-in sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer), it comes across like the original Scream (or at least Scream 2) in comparison to this one. Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (whose previous credit was the so-so high school satire Do Revenge) fails to figure out any way of making the already dubious material work this time around—the screenplay, which she co-wrote with Sam Lansky, is too slavishly indebted to both the original film and the Scream reboot to ever figure out how to work on its own, the dialogue tries to emulate the snarky snap that Kevin Williamson brought to the material the first time around but always sounds too forced for its own good and the big plot twists are about as difficult to solve as a lesser episode of Scooby-Doo. None of the characters, new or old, are particularly interesting and the fact that the closest thing that the film has to something resembling gravitas comes from Freddie Prinze Jr. should say a lot about the enterprise as a whole. Even simply as an excuse for watching pretty people getting slaughtered, it fails because the kill sequences are neither suspenseful nor creative in their gruesomeness.
I Know What You Did Last Summer is nostalgia at its emptiest—hell, even the cleavage was more impressive back then. This is a film that exists for no other reason than to serve as a cynical extension of a brand that wasn’t that hot to start with and which will almost certainly be forgotten about completely by this time next year, except for when it pops up on cable and the guide messes up and lists the original as the one that is airing. Sure, the recent Scream and Halloween legacy sequels were pretty awful but at least they had respectable legacies to ransack whereas this is more akin to trying to photocopy Saran Wrap. If you do go to see this, however, stay through the credits for an additional scene that seems to be setting up another sequel—a notion far more frightening than anything found in the film itself