I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) – Know Nothing

Released: 18th July
Seen: 29th September

In 1997, I Know What You Did Last Summer was released to a public who had just had their appetite for slasher films reawakened by the monster hit Scream. I Know What You Did Last Summer was basically the confirmation that Scream wasn’t a fluke, it was the beginning of a revival of the slasher genre that had been floundering since roughly the end of the 80s. It basically cemented that a late 90s slasher would include glossy visuals, quippy dialogue and a cast made up of a lot of well known TV actors trying to make the transition from TV to film. It was a pretty big hit, making just over $125 million at the box office which was enough to get it a direct sequel with the surviving cast, a direct to video sequel that sucks and no one likes, a TV series that no one talks about and now a legacy sequel… because apparently the legacy of I Know What You Did Last Summer was so great it warranted another sequel, such a pity the latest sequel it got was this one.

I Know What You Did Last Summer follows an almost identical plot to the original. Ava (Chase Sui Wonders) comes home to Southport to take part in her friend Danica’s (Madelyn Cline) engagement party. After the party, Ava and Danica grab their friends Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers) and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) to go see a bunch of local fireworks. Doing this naturally means they end up parked on a dangerous mountain road and do something stupid that results in a random person driving off a cliff to their death. Naturally, the five idiots decide to not tell anyone about what happened and go on their merry way. A year later they get notes about how someone knows what they did last summer, people who they hang out with start being murdered by a person in a fisherman slicker with a giant fishhook and eventually they’ll rope in survivors Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.) to help them try to stop the murders… and that’s about it.

To say this film offers nothing really new or interesting to the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise would be an absolute understatement, not just because there wasn’t much to the franchise to begin with. It’s just the same movie as the first one with a forced B plot shoved in the second half to justify dragging Jennifer Love Hewitt away from the 9-1-1 set, and it really didn’t do much to justify that. It’s the same core plot, the same inciting incident, the same handwriting for the same note before the same action scene and almost identical kills. I get that there’s only so much you can do with a guy in a slicker with a hook… except Scream is on its seventh movie and has mostly managed to keep things feeling fresh, so what the hell is this film’s excuse? For a film made by a company called Original Film, it’s stunning how little originality there is. 

It’s not helped that no one in I Know What You Did Last Summer is really interesting or memorable. None of the characters really stand out, they aren’t doing anything very interesting or have any quirks that made them stand out. If they don’t stand out, it’s impossible to like them or care about them even after they start being picked off. Some of them look so similar that it’s genuinely hard to know who is being killed at what moment, it’s just so generic that you really can’t begin to care enough. This isn’t to say anyone is particularly bad, everyone is doing a serviceable job with what they’ve been given but there’s no one really bringing anything worthy of praise. Even the two returning survivors that allow this to be considered a legacy sequel aren’t really given much. It’s funny how they claim that Jennifer Love Hewitt only agreed to return if she had something to do when realistically she could be edited out of the film with nothing of value lost. 

To give I Know What You Did Last Summer some credit, it does look quite good. While the big death scenes aren’t exactly unique or original, they are really well shot and sometimes even manage to give the film life. The first big one involving Danica’s fiancé is actually really well done; it’s enough to give you hope that maybe they’re going to push this film into being something slightly interesting, and then the film keeps going, and that hope kind of goes away, leaving you with a subpar version of the 1997 version. There’s maybe one scene where the film really does elevate itself into something interesting, and it only does that through a particularly iconic cameo that is certainly a wildly enjoyable moment, before you realise it adds nothing to the film other than a cute callback. It’s a fun enough cameo that if you don’t know who it is and still plan on watching it I don’t want to ruin it, but if we’re being honest, it’s a cameo that’s there as fan service and nothing more.

What’s particularly annoying is how I Know What You Did Last Summer handles its legacy characters; it feels like they were afterthoughts that were added in when someone insisted the film be a legacy sequel instead of a remake. Jennifer Love Hewitt gets nothing to do, honestly, nothing whatsoever. She’s not really kicking ass, she doesn’t save the day, she doesn’t get to deal with her emotional past or even really interact with most of the main cast. She’s there because she’s the final girl of the original film, and if we don’t bring her on, then we’re not doing a legacy sequel properly. Every other legacy sequel in this genre at least had the common decency to make their returning final girl try to kick the bad guy’s ass; this one will just let her watch while the modern characters do all the work. What they do with Freddie Prinze is almost worse; his character just doesn’t feel like the same Ray we had nearly 30 years ago, and he’s also barely in the damn film until right at the end, when he just gets to be his most annoying. It’s an insult to the characters that people came to love from the original movies, they’re treated like afterthoughts… worse than that, cos it doesn’t feel like there was much thought put into them.

Look, I’m not saying I Know What You Did Last Summer is the worst film in the franchise… but that’s because the bar for this franchise is already so low that it’s in hell. It’s the second best if we’re ranking them, but that doesn’t mean that it’s good. It’s just a pretty basic copy of the original film with less interesting characters and a longer runtime for no good goddamn reason. I almost wish it were worse because then it might be entertainingly bad, but as it is, the film is just dull and easy to forget.