The Egregiously Awful I Know What You Did Last Summer Brings Together the Present and the Past in the Clumsiest, Least Organic Way

It's not good!

A legacy sequel is an awfully grandiose term for opportunistic follow-ups that exploit cheap nostalgia for franchises angling for a comeback by bringing back familiar names while injecting new blood.

With the 2025 I Know What You Did Last Summer, those familiar names include Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., and a surprise cameo that’s not much of a surprise. If you have any familiarity with the series, you can probably guess who I’m referring to.

I refuse to disclose the name of this mystery cameo. Let’s just say she might have cruel intentions, but her performance slays and is simply irresistible. Also, her name is Sarah Michelle Gellar.

I Know What You Did Last Summer stumbles in the footsteps of the 2022 Scream legacy sequel, which beat the odds and became both a critical and commercial success.

That’s appropriate, since the 1997 I Know What You Did Last Summer similarly followed in the zeitgeist-capturing success of the 1996 Scream.

I Know What You Did Last Summer shared a screenwriter with Scream and a sensibility. But where Scream was prankishly post-modern, I Know What You Did Last Summer was a throwback to teen slasher movies of the 1980s.

The new I Know What You Did Last Summer steals from the original, but it also steals extensively from Jaws.

Grant Spencer (Rocketeer Billy Campbell, looking good), a wealthy real estate developer and the father of one of the film’s protagonists, is essentially the mayor of Amity in Jaws: a heartless, greedy opportunist who isn’t about to let the horrific deaths of locals get in the way of a lucrative tourist season.

I Know What You Did Last Summer even includes a town hall scene where desperate townspeople grapple with a murderous danger in their midst. Freddie Prinze Jr. resembles Robert Shaw in Jaws to the point that I half-expected him to introduce himself with, “Y'all know me. Know how I earn a living!”

The legacy sequel posits Grant as someone so rich and powerful that he was able to erase all references to the massacre from the internet in the first film. I know that there are services that allow people to have damaging information about them and their close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein removed from the internet for a fee. But I don’t think it’s possible to eliminate everything, particularly given the public’s enduring obsession with true crime, mass murder, and serial killers.

I Know What You Did Last Summer contradicts itself by making one of its minor characters a sexy lesbian who hosts a true crime podcast and makes out with one of our heroes in a wonderfully unnecessary scene more concerned with hot girl-on-girl action than characterization or plot.

The film confusingly acknowledges that the public is unhealthily obsessed with true crime, and can’t get enough of their favorite murders and murderers, yet still insists that Southport, North Carolina, became a lucrative tourist trap despite being the site of a massacre, not because of it.

In our world, Southport would be famous for its massacre. In the film’s gratingly unrealistic realm, the opposite is true. Information about the fisherman’s reign of terror is secret and forbidden.

When Ava Brooks (Chase Sui Wonders) flies into Southport for a party to celebrate queen bee Danica Richards’ (Madelyn Cline) impending nuptials to rich jock Teddy Spencer (Tyriq Withers), Grant’s son, she’s oblivious to the town’s dark history.

Ava, Danica, Danica’s ex-boyfriend Milo Griffin (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy, and their outcast acquaintance Stevie Ward (Sarah Pidgeon) may or may not know Southport’s dark history, but they’re doomed to repeat it all the same.

After five friends share the world’s thinnest joint and ingest copious amounts of hard liquor, they end up hitting someone with their car. This occurs in a stretch notorious for fatal crashes, yet that somehow does not stop Teddy, who is, it should be noted, a fucking asshole, from daring cars to hit him by goofing around in the middle of the road.

This leads inevitably to disaster when a car swerves to avoid him and ends up teetering on the edge of a steep cliff.

In a misguided attempt to make the protagonists more likable and sympathetic, they do everything they can to prevent the car from plunging off the cliff. It does not work. The automobile falls, killing its passenger instantly.

The five then follow again in the footsteps of the protagonists of the original in making a sacred vow to never talk about what happened that awful evening.

Then, in an exceedingly predictable development, Danica receives an anonymous note from someone who knows what they did last summer and wants the guilty parties to be very scared.

A hulking figure in fisherman garb begins murdering the people closest to our heroes.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is a mystery as well as a slasher movie. That’s not particularly rare. The central mystery in this kind of lurid fare is, of course, the identity of the masked slasher.

In this case, it’s less a “whodunit?” than a “whocares?”

As a villain, The Fisherman is deeply unsatisfying. The Fisherman doesn’t talk. He doesn’t wisecrack. He just kills in a brutal but not particularly distinctive fashion.

In their desperate bid for answers, the protagonists seek help from Julie Jones (Jennifer Love Hewitt), a survivor of the first two films who has since become a professor.

I suspect that they got Prinze Jr. and Hewitt and a mystery cameo to return by telling them that they’d be playing total badasses who dominate the film and steal every scene they’re in.

Considering the generic nature of the new characters and the film itself, it’s not hard to upstage the kids. Hewitt delivers a spirited performance, but the only returning star who makes an indelible impression is the mystery actor I have discussed extensively. She has only one scene, but it’s the most memorable one in the movie.

Julie encourages the kids to do some research to find out the identity of the killer fisherman so that they can kill him or her before he or she slaughters them en masse.

Stop reading if, for some inexplicable reason, you still want to see this hackneyed horror show and don’t want the ending spoiled.

I was not a fan of Urban Legend, another post-modern terror tale from the post-Scream meta-horror boom. I was particularly appalled that the mystery slasher turned out to be a character played by Rebecca Gayheart.

The model-turned-actress was a 100 pounds soaking wet, yet Urban Legend asked us to believe this tiny human being was capable of murdering people twice her size.

On a similar note, I Know What You Did Last Summer eventually reveals that the sociopath behind the murders is Stevie. She was friends and church buddies with Sam Cooper, the ostensibly lonely and unloved person they killed that fateful night.

The actress who plays Stevie is only slightly more imposing than Gayheart. It just does not make sense that someone so small would be able to throw around adults like rag dolls.

Ah, but Stevie wasn’t acting alone. Her boss, best friend, and mentor, Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.), helped her because he thought the quintet treated Sam poorly, even as they went out of their way to try to prevent his death. Also, trauma is a tricky thing. It can easily lead to taking on the persona of a fisherman-themed serial killer and murdering a group of young people.

I Know What You Did Last Summer doubles up by having multiple generations of kids who felt guilty about their sins and transgressions turn out to be the guilty party.

As a nostalgia-prone Gen Xer with a weakness for cheesy horror movies, I’m I Know What You Did Last Summer’s target demographic. Yet I found myself rolling my eyes and groaning out loud.

It saddens me to have to report that the makers of this film did not spend the 27 years separating it from I Still Know What You Did Last Summer perfecting the screenplay. Instead, it feels like they spent that time making the movie worse until they had seemingly gone as far as they could go.

I will concede that watching this after Michael Mann’s 1986 masterpiece Manhunter did it no favors. Mann’s film is even more stunning compared to this schlock.

Nostalgia is a powerful force, but I Know What You Did Last Summer reveals its weakness rather than its strengths.

One star out of five

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