Review: I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

Rated R for bloody horror violence, language throughout, some sexual content and brief drug use

Score: 2 out of 5

I Know What You Did Last Summer, the latest nostalgic legacy sequel to a famous older horror property, is the best thing to come out of its franchise since 1997. Given the track record of said franchise, this is not a compliment. I maintain that the 1997 original remains the only truly good film in the series, and even then, Lois Duncan, the author of the original novel it was based on, sharply disagreed with that assessment and went on record as having hated the movie (though, admittedly, her issues with it were more personal and unique to her), and at any rate I would not call it untouchable. The sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, cranked out the following year to cash in on the first movie's success, was as ho-hum as late '90s teen slashers come and a film that did not improve upon a rewatch, and the less said about the direct-to-video third installment I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, the better. When most people are talking about their nostalgia for this series, they're mostly talking about the first movie, not the sequels, unless they're talking about how good Brandy Norwood looked in I Still Know. In a way, it's almost kind of refreshing for one of these to miss the landing, because in doing so, for better or worse, it put me in the headspace of watching a slasher movie from the post-Scream Y2K era. That era did produce some good movies (including the first IKWYDLS), and those films are often a great way to introduce younger or more squeamish viewers to horror due to their more lighthearted tone and lower levels of graphic violence, but I feel that it has been treated with a bit too much nostalgia by people too young to remember some of its stinkers. Let's just say, there's a reason why so much of the 2000s torture porn boom felt like a reaction to everything that the "WB period of horror" (as Julia Alexander has called it) represented.

At any rate, this movie does have its charms. For starters, everything related to the "legacy" parts of its legacy sequel plot stands head and shoulders above the rest of the movie. I recall thinking that Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddy Prinze, Jr. came off as flat playing Julie and Ray in the original, but time and experience seem to have made them better actors, as their role in the story gives them the opportunity to take their characters to some interesting places that I wished the film spent more time focused on. It makes some gutsy decisions with their character arcs, too, especially that of Ray, decisions that I know are going to be controversial but which at least make this film do more than just go through the motions. It felt like this was where the real interests of writer/director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson lay, as the film comes alive when they're on screen or the plot otherwise concerns them. Did it stick the landing every time? No. Again, I can see it being controversial, for many of the same reasons why Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween was. But as far as officially-produced fanfic goes, I could do far worse than this. Also, while a lot of the newer cast is pretty forgettable, Madelyn Cline rises above the material and honestly deserved a bigger role. She's basically playing the Sarah Michelle Gellar role here, and much like Helen Shivers, her character Danica Richards was easily the MVP of the younger characters. Danica was an underwritten, one-dimensional character on the page who doesn't really get much to do in the plot except serve as the final girl's sidekick, but Cline is great at playing these kinds of ditzy, bubbly girls who are smarter than they seem, and honestly, much like Gellar in the original, she should've been the heroine. Gellar herself gets a great cameo, too, one that I think could've been used as the basis for a more interesting direction that the film could've taken Danica's character in.

Alas, there's the rub. It felt like, with the new cast, there were far more interesting directions the film could've gone in than just the boilerplate '90s slasher they ultimately went with. The premise of the original movie, that a group of carefree young people (this time friends getting together for an engagement party) are involved in a tragic accident on a dangerous local road that gets a man killed and then find themselves stalked and murdered one year later by somebody who wants revenge, is recycled wholesale, and while the film does put some amusing twists on precisely how it happens, it still strains my willing suspension of disbelief that the exact same thing could happen to a completely different group of people 28 years later on the same stretch of road on Fourth of July weekend. There were subplots involving minor characters like an obnoxious true crime podcaster (a character type that, side note, modern horror movies need to stop relying on as a way to create hate sinks -- yes, we know true crime podcasters are generally scummy people, Tragedy Girls already did it and did it better than you ever can) a creepy pastor who's connected to the victim in the opening, and the gentrification of the town in the decades since the first movie, but they never engaged me and never contributed anything except to provide red herrings that I saw right through. It felt like, after Robinson and co-writer Sam Lansky got done writing all the "legacy" parts of this movie involving Julie and Ray, they got lazy and just let ChatGPT handle the rest of the screenplay, filling it in with the most basic swill one can imagine. Barring Cline, none of the new cast really impressed me, either. There may be some more diversity than there was in 1997 (the final girl Ava is half-Asian and bisexual, the friendly ex-boyfriend Teddy is at least part-Black), and the fashions have been updated for the age of Instagram, but this is otherwise the sort of slasher cast that The Cabin in the Woods devoted itself to lampooning over a decade ago. The protagonists were all one-note archetypes to a fault, dependent on their actors to elevate them, and it's really fortunate that this movie had Cline, because the cast here was otherwise largely forgettable from start to finish. None of them were outright distractingly bad, but they still came off as just wallpaper.

Finally, we come to the final piece of the puzzle for any horror movie worth its salt: is it scary? No, not really. There were moments when Robinson's direction did provide some good chills, most notably a scene involving the killer hiding in plain sight in front of a statue in a darkened hallway, but all too often, it's content to rest on callbacks to the original in its setups. The Fisherman, this series' iconic slasher, is still a mean bastard who looks the part, but when it comes down to business, the kills felt oddly sanitized in a way that called to mind the late '90s in the worst way, only now in an era where they no longer have the excuse of the MPAA being overly puritanical. The original was no gorefest either, but it still brought the pain where it counted, while here, only Teddy's fight with the Fisherman really felt like it had any energy to it, especially the part where a wounded Teddy, bleeding from the mouth, gets the upper hand over the seemingly defeated killer in a moment of fleeting glory and spits blood on him. The kills and chase sequences felt like they were included purely out of obligation, with nothing recapturing the spark of Helen's chase or the finale on the boat.

The Bottom Line

The latest I Know What You Did Last Summer movie gets points for ambition, which means that I can at least say it's better than I Still Know, but fumbles the execution and perhaps does a bit too good a job feeling like a bad late '90s slasher movie. Unless you're a diehard fan, I'd skip it.