I Know What You Did Last Summer review – fun 90s slasher revival hooks us back in

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Rushed into production after the surprise success of 1996’s Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer has forever lived, and suffered, in the same bracket. Sure it’s another slasher with another cast of unblemished faces and sure it’s also written by Kevin Williamson but it’s always been a far simpler, straighter, sillier film. Scream was trying to reinvent the wheel while I Know What You Did Last Summer was just trying to keep it going.

As a franchise, it then quickly became the very thing Williamson was poking fun at in the first place with a rubbishy Bahamas-set sequel (I Still Know What You Did Last Summer!) and, at the time, an inevitable, tossed off, straight-to-video follow-up (I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer!). People quickly gave up caring what anyone had been up to during any summer on record and as the subgenre died, it wisely followed. But as Hollywood continues to fixate on millennial nostalgia, history is repeating itself as a revival of Scream (with two new films both hitting bigger than expected and a third on the way) is now being followed by a return for the fisherman, still thrashing away in the shadow of Ghostface, grunting dumbly while his predecessor delivers a self-satisfied lecture on the state of genre film-making (like Scream, there was also a limp TV resurrection that’s best ignored).

Expectations lowered, there’s enough hokey fun to be had here, the familiar formula – kids do a bad thing, someone tortures them for it, with a standard 2020s uplift – new cast meets old cast. It means a return for 90s heartthrobs Jennifer Love Hewitt (who’s been cashing in with a role on TV’s absurd procedural 9-1-1) and Freddie Prinze Jr (who’s been appearing in films you definitely haven’t seen), bringing back one-note characters that were never more then chess pieces but doing it well (they share a solid one-on-one scene that’s more substantial than anything yet given to the returning Scream leads). Like Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode who became an alcoholic headmistress in Halloween H20 (a far superior sequel than anything in David Gordon Green’s aggressively stupid trilogy), LoveHewitt’s Julie James is now working in education (a professor!) and she’s dragged back to her home town of Southport when a group of twentysomethings receive a familiar note, a year on from a preventable accident.

The sharp young cast, led by Bodies Bodies Bodies standout Chase Sui Wonders, Glass Onion’s Madelyn Cline and Stereophonic’s Tony nominee Sarah Pidgeon, are all stronger than the characters they’ve been given, their dynamic made less effective without the tragedy of high school innocence ending and with an unwise attempt to reconfigure the opening accident. In trying to upend expectations, writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (who made one of Netflix’s sharpest and funniest teen comedies Do Revenge) messes with the beats a little too much and never really finds a way to smartly justify why the friends wouldn’t have fessed up in the beginning. But what Robinson does understand is that the original two films were both slickly made studio horrors underlined by a real sincerity and her redo is both ravishingly glossy (it looks like a real movie unlike 2022’s Scream which looked like a Netflix movie) and taken just about seriously enough without resorting to easy wink-wink smugness. When the script, co-written by journalist and author Sam Lansky, does try to inject humour, it’s mostly of a limited LA brand, referencing guided meditations and astrology but not doing much with it (I was genuinely shocked that vaping wasn’t also used as a source of comedy). It’s not annoying enough to distract but it’s never quite as funny as it could be.

While the first film did achieve some genuinely jolting set pieces (Sarah Michelle Gellar’s final chase scene remains a seat-edge highpoint), there’s a lack of equivalent suspense with an uptick in gore used instead. The death scenes are certainly gnarly but there’s a rhythm that’s slightly out of step and Robinson is far more comfortable with the soapy mystery of it all, keenly aware of the franchise’s origins in high school paperback storytelling (the first was based on a 70s young adult novel) and there’s a propulsive snap to the Scooby Doo plotting (a character even references the show at one point). So while the double-bluff finale might lack tension (both sequences taking place in the daylight is a real atmosphere-killer), the gleefully absurd reveals almost make up for it. There’s something charmingly deranged about this kind of hyper-specific fan service, appealing to a select few with the brash confidence that everyone knows exactly what you’re talking about. There’s not only a surprise dream sequence cameo but a mid-credits sequence that’s one of the battiest fanfic indulgences I have seen outside of a Marvel movie (am I, a 90s teen who grew up on these movies, being ruthlessly, and successfully, targeted?).

Early buzz has suggested that a younger audience doesn’t really know what happened last summer and an older audience doesn’t really care and so it’s possible that this will live on mostly as a pop culture curio. But at a time of nostalgia overload (Clueless, Legally Blonde and Urban Legend are next), Robinson finds a way to make her attempt not exactly necessary but unpretentiously pleasurable enough for that not to really matter. There might not be a next summer but this makes for an entertaining last hurrah.