Jim Gillespie’s I Know What You Did Last Summer can be considered the bastard heir apparent to Scream, and not simply because Kevin Williamson wrote them both. After a solid decade of Freddy and Jason’s rote adventures in the well-trod supernatural side of things, genre-savvy audiences wanted to be surprised. Scream acknowledged the form and had fun with its conventions, while Summer was Williamson’s attempt to play it straight, drawing inspiration from both Lois Duncan’s 1973 novel and a legion of similarly-themed “guilty conscience” slashers that had their day in the early ‘80s. Sure, it pissed off Duncan to no end to see her much-milder work transformed into Prom Night: The Next Generation (especially after her daughter’s real-life murder remained unsolved), and Gillespie wasn’t exactly Wes Craven, but it made money hand over fist and sustained the slasher for a few more years until it collapsed after 9/11. It seemed properly dead and buried after the third installment in the series went direct-to-video (perhaps because they ran out of suitable adverbs to add to the title), but the content mill is always churning. So, almost thirty years after the first installment and three after Scream V established that there is a market for ‘90s horror revivals, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s I Know What You Did Last Summer enters the legacyquel fray. The results may surprise you.
(Stop me/stop me/stop me) Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: five kids – well, “kids” is particularly generous, given that our protagonists this time around are eight years out of high school by the time the story starts – cause an accident on a coastal North Carolina highway and accidentally kill a driver. It’s a bit milder than it was for Sarah Michelle Gellar and the crew back in 1996: the group merely causes the driver to swerve into a guardrail and ultimately fails to pull him from the car before he plunges into the craggy shoreline below. That’s one way to ruin a Fourth-of-July weekend, and, if you’re Danica (Madelyn Cline) and Teddy (Tyriq Withers), a really shitty way to celebrate getting engaged. Over the objections of their other friends – co-protagonist Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), her timid ex Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), and the estranged Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) – the two ask the group to help them cover up their tangential involvement with the accident. After all, it’s manslaughter, isn’t it? Sure, there are about eight thousand different ways you could get out of that legal trap, but it’s not drunkenly running over a pedestrian or a cyclist. Either way, Danica and Teddy are rich as fuck, and they can’t really be bothered with it.
A year passes, and it’s clear that this event has wrecked the crew by the time they all head back to Southport. Danica broke off her engagement with Teddy, choosing another rich alcoholic without a literal body count to his name; Teddy spent the year getting fucked up on his dad’s yacht; Ava, uh, didn’t talk to anybody and fucked a true crime podcaster she met on the plane; Milo’s just kind of there; and Stevie seems particularly well-adjusted, which is suspicious. Yet Stevie’s the only one who’s really been there for her friends in the aftermath, and she’s just as stunned as anyone when Danica, at her bridal shower, opens up a card and gets that classic message: “Congratulations! Love Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Jim.” No, I’m kidding: it’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” which I can’t help but read in a trailer narrator’s voice every time I see it. And, sure enough, our mysterious, murderous fisherman comes back with a vengeance. Harpoon gun, hook, and so on and so forth: all he’s missing from the nautical instruments of death are a net and a whale rib bone (ask founding father Govenour Morris what damage that little thing can do). So, the Scooby gang’s gotta survive the murders and unmask the killer, and yadda yadda. You know how this goes, but it’s decently fun to watch it all unfold.
I’ll be totally real with you: There isn’t much beyond nostalgia that keeps the original memorable (aside from Gellar’s fabulously catty and scene-stealing performance, that is), and I think Robinson totally understands that. Instead of fully bogging down the movie with echoes of the prior installments, she opts for a stylistic evocation of the era, preserving the rhythms of ‘90s genre well. There are enough ten-second needle-drops thrown about here that it feels like this is less a movie than a stimulus package for dinosaur-bass alt-rock bands; the lifestyles of the upper-classes in Southport remain as absurdly lavish as they were back in the day; and there are enough contrivances to keep cellphones out of our characters’ hands so that the plot isn’t simply solved in fifteen seconds. The signs of modernity come in the brutality of the kills, which are much gorier (the original film had to have blood added to it lest it strain credulity), and in the dialogue, whose laugh lines have been updated for a modern age (jokes about The Body Keeps the Score and so on). This mixture works surprisingly well, especially as the younger portion of the cast, led by Wonders and Cline, nail the tone. There are affectionate nods to the previous films tossed about beyond the obvious — Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt are back! — but nothing that derails the film’s momentum.
Is it going to lead to a massive I Know What You Did Last Summer revival? Well, the deeply amusing post-credits sequence makes me hope it well, but I have my doubts. Regardless, it’s not nearly as bad as you might think based on the franchise pedigree, and shows that there’s some real meat left on the conceptual bones for IP scavengers to strip, provided they put an ounce of care into its extraction. It’s no Final Destination: Bloodlines, but it’s not Thor: Love and Thunder either, which was Robinson’s major credit as a writer before this one. So yeah, I’m counting all of that as a win and a feel-good story, and I Know What You Did Last Summer earns the coveted title of “Best Horror Wide Release of the Week” this week. It may be just a tad too long, but it’s still 50 minutes shorter than Eddington. That would have been enough for the win, but it helps that the movie’s fun, too.