Stream It Or Skip It?

I Know What You Did Last Summer (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) has been drafting on the success of Scream for nigh-on three decades now. Wes Craven’s genre-redefining 1996 film set the tone for self-aware horror-comedy, inspiring sequels, a spinoff TV series and a reboot/requel/legasequel/whatever in the 2020s with original and new cast members. The first IKWYDLS, which was amusing in concept but otherwise very dumb, was rushed out in 1997 to capitalize on Screamania, inspiring sequels, a spinoff TV series and now a whatever in the 2020s, bringing back OGs Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. and introducing newbs Chase Sui Wonders and Madelyn Cline. The result? Still amusing in concept, but otherwise, even dumber.

The Gist: Oh noes! What did they do last summer this time? You may recall the original IKWYDLSers accidentally hit and killed a man with a car and tried to cover it up and then a year later realized the coverup didn’t stick via a mysterious note reading “I know what you did last summer.” The new characters here in 2025 – Danica (Cline), Ava (Wonders), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers) and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) – stand in the middle of the road when a truck veers to not hit them and ends up teetering on the edge of a cliff. They try to save the driver, and their efforts involve a couple of 115-lb. women digging their high heels into the gravel and pulling on the back bumper, so of course it doesn’t work and the vehicle smashes to bits at the bottom. But hey, at least they tried. 

Obviously, these people are top-shelf, gold-medal, opposite-of-Mensa-level twits, so we shouldn’t be at all surprised that they make the anti-logical decision to have Teddy’s rich father – he practically owns their hometown of Southport – pull strings and cover up their involvement in the tragedy. And from here, the film becomes a highly detailed forensic procedural that makes Zodiac look like Blue’s Clues, and not a moronic slasher slopfest. No! That’s a lie! It’s absolutely a moronic slasher slopfest! I mean, it might be easier for Teddy’s rich father to make any minor legal infractions go away than to erase all evidence of these idjits being at the scene, but I assume at this point in the screenplay-writing process it would’ve been too much work to go back two pages and rewrite the scenario to make the protags’ malfeasances worthy of something so irrelevant as the basic concept of the movie, so they just kept on keepin’ on, making everything more complicated and stoopid from there on out. Makes sense!

OK, so, ONE YEAR LATER reads a title card with a font that’s so 1997 you can’t help but feel nostalgic for movies from that year, right? RIGHT? Sure. There’s a joke about Danica being such a superficial airhead that she has a second fiancee in as many years, and it’s so poorly communicated and executed that, by the time you root out the comedy needle from the haystack, you will have forgotten that it’s intended to be funny. Anyways, she’s opening gifts at the bridal shower for the wedding to the second guy when she gets an anonymous card reading the title of the movie. She freaks out and goes home and puts a blood-red bath bomb in the tub and dons headphones and doesn’t hear a peep from the other room, where her fiancee is getting harpooned by the IKWYDLS signature slasher, The Fisherman. “Take the code to my crypto wallet!” screams the fiancee in a desperate attempt to bargain for his life. Tragically, The Fisherman is not interested.

And so our intrepid morons scream and wail as the killer keeps killing (the annoying true-crime podcaster Ava befriends might as well host a show titled Stab Me Right Here Mr. Fisherman) and Teddy’s dad and local authorities Jaws up the situation by downplaying the deaths in order to keep property values from plummeting or something. I dunno. This part of the plot is even less well-thought-out than the other not-very-well-thought-out stuff, and that stuff is very noticeably not-very-well-thought-out. Inevitably our puddingbrained protags seek help from people who’ve been through this before, namely, Julie James (Love Hewitt), now a professor giving lectures about trauma, and local bar owner Ray Bronson (Prinze). And any hope that they can staunch the ceaseless flow of utter witlessness from this screenplay goes unfounded. Sorry!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The recent Scream whateverquels kinda sucked, but they look like the first two Godfathers compared to this recrement.

Performance Worth Watching: Love Hewitt gritting her teeth and delivering the now-infamous line “Nostalgia is overrated!” is proof that money is a powerful motivator.

Memorable Dialogue: This exchange:

Ava: How are you doing?

Danica: Bad. How are you doing? 

Ava: Bad.

We, the audience: Hey! Over here! We’re also not well!

Sex and Skin: Lots of flesh on display, but no actual bits nor pieces.

Our Take: The new IKWYDLS is stupid and annoying garbage nonsense even before we get to the scene featuring the immortal line, “It’s 1997 all over again. Isn’t that nostalgic?” The fakeouts are lame, the jump scares are lamer and the kills are the lamest, bog-standard stabbings and off-the-rack impalements delivered with zero imagination or creativity. The most gruesome thing about the movie is the dialogue, which ranges from “Can you believe our best friends are getting married” to “It’s the Fourth of July” to verbal descriptions of internet memes to “I just have one question: what did you do last summer?” It’s delivered via sleepy line readings and dead-eyed monologues, or even worse, characters not simply talking to themselves, but exposition-dumping on themselves like the Satanic shaman pouring sheep’s blood on his own head prior to the ritual sacrifice.

Now, I’m not prejudiced against self-aware slasher movies that think they’re so clever, but this is a quasi-movie in all aspects: It’s unwilling to commit to its own premise (what they did last summer wasn’t so bad) or methodology (the self-awareness takes an unfortunate turn into self-seriousness in the third act). And as directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge), the film is poorly executed across the board, its 111-minute bloat defined by sluggish pacing and slipshod editing. Co-writing with Sam Lansky, Robinson gropes in the dark in search of a tone, landing in a bland nether-zone between winking spoofery and po-faced slasher tropes, and their characters are either Zoomer nethernoggins or the uber-serious Gen Xers who actually take the world seriously. The comedy hits like wet farts and the thrills don’t hit at all. I hereby challenge you to remember I Know What You Did Last Summer by next summer. Good luck!

Our Call: Clomp clomp clomp go the boots of The Fisherman. Clomp clomp clomp. I’ll give this movie some boots. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.