I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

1 Star (out of 4)

Bored Fishing

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

These movies, based on a young adult novel published in 1973, have never worked, and they continue not working in a terrible tangle of bad logic, bad motivations, and overall greed. The new I Know What You Did Last Summer is another one for the chum bucket.

Danica (Madelyn Cline) throws an engagement party for herself and her fiance Ted (Tyriq Withers) in Southport, North Carolina. Old friends Ava (Chase Sui Wonders) and Milo (Jonah Hauer-King) return home for the celebration. The group decides to drive up to a special spot to watch the Fourth of July fireworks. At the last minute, they run into another old friend, Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), and invite her along.

After smoking pot, Ted begins acting out and stands in the road as a car comes along, causing a fatal accident. The panicked friends call the police and flee the scene. A year later, Danica is having a wedding shower. She receives an envelope with the sinister message "I Know What You Did Last Summer." That night a mysterious figure in a rain slicker with a fisherman's hook begins a new killing spree. The friends decide to call on Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), who survived a similar situation back in 1997, for help.

The original 1997 movie almost had a chance, with a screenplay by the red-hot Kevin Williamson (Scream), but it was too generic and superficial. The sequels — which required additional groups of people to assemble, cause an accident, and flee the scene — worked far less well, and rank among the worst horror/slasher movies ever made. The idea of a killer waiting an entire year to strike, just so they can send a sinister postcard with the movie's title, is also ridiculous.

The new "requel" is painfully guilty of riding on the coattails of the two most recent, and successful, Scream movies (just as the original movie did), and copies ideas such as re-assembling the original, surviving cast members. But not everything that worked for Scream works for the Last Summer crew; these characters are not media-savvy, and they are not particularly smart.

The cast, as with the 1997 movie, consists entirely of good-looking White people without much depth, although Madelyn Cline, who plays the airhead Danica (and who held her own with the cast of Glass Onion as Dave Bautista's girlfriend "Whiskey") adds some delightfully humorous touches to her character. And, unlike many horror movies, there is a real sense of mourning and guilt here, as characters experience regret and trauma over their actions and losses. But overall I Know What You Did Last Summer is less like a day at the beach than it is a day in the pits.