Review: I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006)

I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006)

Rated R for horror violence

Score: 1 out of 5

The other sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer, and the one that nobody asked for. Dumped straight to video in 2006, this is a film that wears the all of the trappings of a post-Scream slasher movie: some bloody kills, some attractive teenage (i.e. twentysomething) leads, a slick visual style, modern rock music, all that jazz. It's just that it all feels like a half-hearted retread of a plot that's been done twice before, and better both times (yes, even the sequel). It copies the aesthetic and story beats of its predecessors without seeming to understand why they worked in those films, something that is best exemplified by the fact that, even though the setting has moved from a North Carolina fishing town to a Colorado resort town, the killer is still clad in a rain slicker like he's headed out on a fishing boat to catch some sea bass off the Outer Banks. It's a film that took the bankable name of its predecessor and little else, years after the trend in horror that that film was such a big part of had ceased to be relevant, and the entire thing stinks of a lazy cash grab.

Despite the fact that it's billed as a sequel, I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer is practically a remake of the first film in all but name, albeit with the names of the lead characters changed. At the Fourth of July carnival in Breckenridge... sorry, Broken Ridge, Colorado, a group of teenagers -- the blonde heroine Amber, her boyfriend Colby, her punk friend Zoe, the layabout Roger, and the sheriff's son P. J. -- decide to stage a prank inspired by the urban legend of "The Fisherman", which is the only connection we get to the prior films. Because these kids are stupid, P. J. accidentally gets killed, and the rest of the group agrees to cover up their involvement while the police hunt for a nonexistent hook-wielding murderer. The following summer, Amber and Colby have broken up, Zoe is the singer in a punk rock band, and Roger has turned into a burnout working maintenance on the gondola. And before you can say that Amber is a clone of Julie, Barry is Colby, Zoe is Helen, and Roger is Ray, Amber starts getting text messages telling her "I know what you did last summer" and people start dying.

I'm not kidding about the plot being almost a beat-for-beat copy of the first film. Instead of Helen's beauty pageant, we get Zoe's rock show. Instead of Ray working as a fisherman in the local industry, Roger is working as a repairman in the local industry. Even the death order is broadly similar to the first film, especially where the four main characters are concerned. I wouldn't have minded this if the film had been a straight remake, or if it had any standout qualities of its own. Instead, there is a plot full of loose threads that never go anywhere, a whodunit mystery that is resolved with a fizzle, numerous continuity errors, and an overly stylized aesthetic that absolutely confounded me. When it works in its more subdued moments, director Sylvain White's visual style is often the only thing in this that I can call genuinely good, especially when he's focusing on the Rocky Mountain vistas of the setting (Utah standing in for neighboring Colorado). When it doesn't, however, it turns the film into what I can only call a music video on cocaine, the problems being most pronounced in the death scenes that verge on the incomprehensible. I appreciated the surprisingly high quality of the gore effects when I could see them (it's arguably the bloodiest film in the series), but given that the camera was often spinning and jerking around like mad, that was rarely a given. The disastrous editing is just as apparent in the visible continuity errors. Day transitions into night after a character spends a few minutes inside a building. A character gets stabbed in the leg with the Fisherman's hook, and a few hours later he has his leg in a cast without anybody who treated him asking any questions about how he got stabbed in the leg. None of the cast rose above the material the way that Sarah Michelle Gellar did in the first film, or even gave the sort of charismatically campy performance that Jennifer Love Hewitt did. Don Shanks as the Fisherman and Torrey DeVitto as Zoe were the only ones who seemed to have any sort of personality, and that was more for Shanks' physicality as a psycho killer and for Zoe's fashion sense standing out against her preppy co-stars than anything. Nobody was bad, but there was a lot of mediocrity in the cast.

All of this would've been forgivable had the film attained enough basic competence to keep me entertained in a few spots. It's why I think that I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is tolerable, even if it's a clear step down from the first: while it was a bad movie, it still had a handful of good scenes. I'll Always Know, on the other hand, didn't even accomplish that much, and it came down to the script. Put simply, this didn't feel like a coherent movie. Instead, it felt like a series of random events strung together, loosely connected by the fact that there's a killer on the loose and by its imitation of another, better movie. Characters feel like they're just doing things at random, most notably when Zoe decides that performing at her rock show is more important than the fact that she and her friends are being stalked by a hook-wielding maniac. It felt like a fan film where they spent all the money on a couple of cool kills, and when writing the script, devoted more time to homaging scenes from the original than figuring out what made them work. As ridiculous as the mystery in the first film could get, it still worked up to the point of the big reveal. Here, it's treated as an afterthought, resolved with a twist that had not been foreshadowed whatsoever and felt like the writer just came up with something once he realized that he had to end the movie somehow.

The Bottom Line

This is a film that goes through the motions of what a modern slasher is "supposed" to be, and while it wasn't as egregiously bad as, say, Bloody Homecoming or the Prom Night remake, there's still no real reason to watch it, not when its predecessors both exist.