Crew
Director – Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, Screenplay – Sam Lansky & Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, Story – Leah McKendrick & Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, Based on the Novel I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973) by Lois Duncan, Producer – Neal H. Moritz, Photography – Elisha Christian, Music – Chanda Dancy, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jonathan Dearing & Tom Wood, Visual Effects – Foy, SpinVFX (Supervisor – Samir Hoon) & Stage 23 (Supervisor – Jeremy Howdin), Special Effects Supervisor – Dan Oliver, Prosthetics Supervisors – Adam Johansen, Damian Martin & Colin Ware, Production Design – Courtney Andujar & Hillary Andujar. Production Company – Original Film/TSG Entertainment.
Cast
Madelyn Cline (Danica Richards), Chase Sui Wonders (Ava Brucks), Jonah Hauer-King (Milo Griffin), Tyriq Withers (Teddy Spencer), Sarah Pidgeon (Stevie Ward), Billy Campbell (Grant Spencer), Freddie Prinze Jr. (Ray Bronson), Jennifer Love Hewitt (Julie James), Gabriette Bechtel (Tyler Trevino), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Helen Shivers), Brandy Norwood (Karla Wilson), Austin Nichols (Pastor Judah), Joshua Orpin (Wyatt), Nick Farnell (Chief Roberts)
Plot
Ava Brucks returns to her hometown of Southport for the engagement party of her best friend Danica Richards. Ava, her old boyfriend Milo, Danica, her fiancée Teddy and schoolfriend Stevie Ward go out for a drive. Teddy starts fooling around on the road and causes an oncoming car to skid and go over the cliff. Teddy urges all of them to leave the scene and gets his father, a local politician, to cover-up what happened, while they all agree never to talk about it. One year later, Ava returns to town for Danica’s bridal shower. Also arriving in town is Tyler Trevino, the host of a true crime podcast, who is covering the murder spree that occurred back in 1997. Shortly after Ava arrives, someone dressed as the fisherman in a rainslicker and carrying a hook just like the 1997 killer begins a new killing spree, targeting the group for what they did last summer.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) was one of the entries in the Slasher revival fad of the late 1990s that had been popularised by Scream (1996). It boasted a script from Scream writer Kevin Williamson, a popular teen cast of the day and was the twentieth highest grossing film of the year, earning only slightly less than Scream 2 (1997). A sequel was made with I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998) featuring the return of several cast, and a further video-released sequel with I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006), featuring a similar unrelated plot and a new cast. Most recently, the film was remade as the eight-episode tv series I Know What You Did Last Summer (2021).
Recent years have seen successful reboots of popular slasher franchises with Halloween (2018) and Scream (2022), both of which have gone on to spawn sequels. One suspects that this new I Know What You Did Last Summer was conceived in the same vein as both of these in that it is intended as a continuation of the preceding events featuring actors from the original – something that these days gets called a ‘legacy sequel’ – while also appropriating the name of the original film.
It is unclear exactly whether I Know What You Did Last Summer is trying to be a Remake or a Sequel and ends up as some weird hybrid of either. It is a remake in the sense that it repeats the same basic plot as the original did. It is a sequel in that is references the events of the 1997 film as past history and features appearances from original cast members, most notedly Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr, as well as Sarah Michelle Gellar (who was killed in the original and turns up in a lame dream sequence here), and even Brandy Norwood from the sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, who makes an appearance in the middle of the credits.
The remake comes from Jennifer Kaytin Robinson who is known for creating the MTV series Sweet/Vicious (2016-7) about two college girls targeting sexual predators. Robinson has directed the romantic comedy Someone Great (2019) and Do Revenge (2022), while also co-writing Thor: Love and Thunder (2022).
The new I Know What You Did Last Summer has been changed somewhat from the original. In the original, the cast were all teenagers on the cusp of graduating and going off to university. Here they are a year or two on from that, while the racial complement of the quartet has been mixed up from the whitebread originals. There are a few modernisations – the introduction of a true crime podcaster come to cover the 1997 incident and having Chase Sui Wonders hook up with her just before returning to town (a scene that adds nothing except tick another diversity niche). This also offers a new twist on who the killer(s) are, which in this case contains a far-fetched twist on the original.
Here the initial incident from last summer has been watered down. In the original, the group actually ran someone down on the road and then set out to dispose of the body and continued to do so even as it came back to life. Here far more innocuously one of the group is fooling around on the road and causes a vehicle to skid and go over the side (not a crime – at most one that would get a misdemeanour charge of reckless endangerment but no jail time). They then fail to go to check and see if the person is alive (which makes them not nice people but is not a crime either). All of which makes their guilty secret a ridiculous overreaction. In the original, they would have definitely received criminal charges; at most here they would get a fine and maybe a stern glare from the judge.
What also becomes evident is what an unlikeable bunch the new characters are – all abrasive, self-involved preppies. They live in multi-million dollar homes, or go into hiding on their father’s yacht and look down on school friend Sarah Pidgeon because her father blew her college fund and she had to go into drug rehab. Madelyn Cline is shown relaxing with a bath bomb and guided meditation tapes oblivious to her fiancé being killed, while coming out with lines about her ‘claircognizant empath’ and astrological events about to occur. In any other slasher film, this would mark her being one of the first to be killed, whereas here such a self-absorbed character is promoted to the lead.
Jennifer Kaytin Robinson directs one or two slasher sequences early on that are okay, nothing to set the world alight. Indeed, there is little about I Know What You Did Last Summer that gives it anything distinctive. It is just another remake made by people excavating an IP. It is exactly like the spate of horror remakes of 1970s/80s films we had in the early 2000s – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), The Amityville Horror (2005), Friday the 13th (2009), Poltergeist (2015) et al – that replicated the originals on bigger budgets with better known casts – but finding none of the same cultural cachet that the original was greeted with when it appeared. All they were were empty echoes of what went before, hoping to ensnare audiences familiar with the original. There were only the smallest handful of these that did anything new and original. I Know What You Did Last Summer is not one of them.
Trailer here