I recently went back and watched the original I Know What You Did Last Summer and its sequel. (If you know enough to ask about the DTV third movie, you already know the answer.) I was left with the unavoidable conclusion that this never should’ve been a franchise.

To be clear, I understand why the PTB tried to make the first movie into a series: It made money. Lots of money. After all, IKWYDLS sits squarely in the middle of the Venn Diagram between Scream and “Dawson’s Creek”, Kevin Williamson’s other two iconic creations that defined so much of the ’90s. With its teen heartthrob cast and soft-R kills (not to mention that eminently meme-able title), the original film was highly influential as a gateway into slasher horror for a great many young filmgoers of the time.

There is, however, a recurring problem with this series: The source material.

Williamson based his initial script on a 1973 novel by Lois Duncan. The source text was a work of psychological suspense and was most pointedly not a slasher horror. The iconic Fisherman was an invention of the filmmakers. And not for nothing, Duncan herself was deeply unhappy with the change in genre.

(Side note: I feel compelled to add that Duncan’s writing career and attitude toward horror/suspense was never the same after her daughter was brutally murdered in 1989. The murder wasn’t solved until 2021 — the killer was finally convicted in 2024 — and Duncan didn’t live to see it. She had passed away of undisclosed causes back in 2016. I raise a glass to the surviving loved ones of Lois Duncan and Kaitlyn Arquette, may they both rest in peace.)

More importantly, no matter how hard they tried, the original filmmakers could never fully escape the nature of the source text. While the first movie makes for a serviceable slasher horror, it’s far and away more effective as a portrayal of trauma and guilt. The lead characters did an awful thing and they know they did an awful thing. And even as they try to figure out who’s coming after them, desperately fighting to stay alive, they’re running away from the consequences of the awful thing they did, and that evasion weighs down on them through the whole movie.

The point being that in the process of chasing easy box office dollars by making the Fisherman into a straightforward slasher, he became less effective as a looming metaphor of guilt. Even worse, this kind of psychological terror is a trick that only really works once. After all the big reveals have been made and everyone’s gotten their closure, it’s not easy going back to that particular well. As proven by the ludicrous retcons of the second film.

Cut to 2025, and the concept of the horror “remakequel” is now a proven and viable way of revitalizing franchises, most especially horror franchises. Which means that once again, the IKWYDLS franchise is following the trail blazed by the Scream franchise. (Even more ironically, Kevin Williamson himself is getting the Scream franchise back on track, directing the long-awaited seventh entry. But that’s for another day.)

Alas, Williamson himself had nothing to do with I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025), and Lois Duncan was of course too dead to object. No, the responsibility for this one lay with franchise producer Neal H. Moritz and the brain trust at Sony, as they were the ones who’d been trying for the past ten years to try and revive the franchise. It was writer/director/exec producer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson who got the job done, after directing a couple of female-centric dark comedies for Netflix.

Which means that once again, someone is trying to make this into a viable franchise. And once again, they fail.

We pick up in 2025, right back in the picturesque coastal fishing town of Southport, NC. Long story short, the massacre of 1997 cratered the town’s property value, to the point where a deranged billionaire (Grant Spencer, played by Billy Campbell) could pretty much buy the entire town outright. So now he’s trying to make a return on his investment by doing his best to erase the bloody past and bring tourists back.

We meet our Final Girl (Ava, played by Chase Sui Wonders) as she’s coming back from college for the engagement party of her best friend from high school (Danica, played by Madelyn Cline). I might add that Danica’s gotten herself engaged to Teddy (Tyriq Withers), son of the aforementioned deranged billionaire. Oh, and Ava’s old flame (Milo, played by Jonah Hauer-King) is also in attendance.

Anyone familiar with the first movie will already see the pattern. Ava is our new Julie, Milo is our new Ray, Danica (also a former Croaker Queen, I might add) is our new Helen, and Teddy is our new Barry. The major difference is that instead of a movie loaded with shallow Gen-X stereotypes, we now have a movie loaded with shallow Gen-Z stereotypes. This is not an upgrade.

Incidentally, I’d be remiss not to mention Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), the fifth member of our central victim pool. Who has no analogue in the original film. That right there is an upfront signal that she’s going to die and/or turn evil.

Of course, that’s not even getting started on the requisite car accident. For the uninitiated, the original film kicked off when our inebriated teenage crew accidentally killed a stranger in an act of vehicular homicide, disposed of the body, and swore an oath not to tell anyone. The remakequel kicks off when our most drunken and inebriated lead character stands in the middle of the road, leading to a fatal car accident when someone swerves to avoid hitting him. Even though the driver in question would’ve clearly seen the dumb schmuck with plenty of time to brake. And our lead characters make a pact not to tell anyone.

In summary, the ’90s protagonists were directly responsible for a loss of life, and the ’20s protagonists were at most indirectly responsible. I’m no lawyer, but even calling it “manslaughter” sounds like a stretch. And this one change is enough to break the whole godforsaken movie before we’ve even started.

First of all, I know how stupid it sounds to keep comparing this movie to the first one, but the filmmakers openly and directly invited the comparison with this setup. Secondly, it bears repeating that the first movie worked so well because of the pathos involved. Julie and friends were visibly traumatized by the event, so thoroughly wrecked in mind, body, and soul that they looked and acted like totally different people a year later. Even without a slasher running loose, it’s repeatedly and abundantly made clear that this fatal secret will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

We get none of that here. There’s no sense that Ava or her friends ever gave a second thought to that car accident, or that the intervening year would’ve played out much differently. I don’t believe for a minute that any of them are racked with guilt or interested in atoning, they’re only interested in outliving the latest Fisherman. Sure, there are some token efforts at demonstrating that guilt, but all of them ring hollow because there’s none of the pathos or heart that powered the original film.

What’s worse, because there’s so much less culpability for our lead characters, there’s so much less motivation for our antagonists. No matter who the slasher turns out to be or why they’re so hell-bent on revenge, the crux of the matter was such a clearly avoidable accident that the big reveal is all but guaranteed to be bullshit. And the big reveal is indeed more atrocious than I can sufficiently detail here, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Of course the big difference here is that unlike the original movie, our remakequel has precedent to pull from. Unfortunately, it’s a rather significant plot point that the local government has done their damnedest to try and erase all mention of the ’97 massacre. So it’s not like local law enforcement has learned from that history and thus the plot doesn’t really play out any differently for the experience.

Jennifer Love Hewitt shows up, but her character goes extremely far out of her way to avoid getting involved, and she doesn’t even do much when she finally bothers to show up for the climax. Brandy makes a brief return appearance for the mid-credits stinger, teasing a sequel that’s hopefully never coming. A de-aged Sarah Michelle Gellar makes a brief and laughably gratuitous cameo appearance that sinks the film beyond all hope of repair. The less said about Freddie Prinze Jr. and how the filmmakers broke his character, the better.

I will happily grant that the kills are nicely bloody without going aggressively over-the-top, quite impressive by the standards of the franchise. Unfortunately, the suspense/horror atmosphere is consistently ruined by obnoxious musical stings and aggressive sound design. This lack of subtlety extends to the list of suspects, as literally every character who isn’t played by a lead actor is consistently cast, framed, and depicted as a shady motherfucker who shouldn’t be trusted with any sharp instruments.

Most importantly, I keep coming back to how this movie consistently fails because there’s no pathos or dimension or inner turmoil to any of these characters. It’s not fun when a heel dies because the kills aren’t quite bloody enough for that, and it’s not engaging when a face is in danger because none of the characters are interesting or sympathetic enough for that. Thus we end up in a boring kind of middle ground.

Pretty much everyone in the victim pool — most especially those first few kills — are shallow, two-dimensional, transparently awful parodies of Gen-Z culture. Considering how many young Gen-Xers got started on horror with the original film, I’m gravely disappointed to think of how many Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha filmgoers will be alienated by their generation’s portrayal in this film. It’s a disgraceful failure to the original film’s legacy.

With all of that said, I honestly don’t think this film was made with any malice. We do get some open (albeit empty) discussion from the characters with regard to guilt and trauma. We get a lot of extravagant fan service (perhaps too much). If I squint and tilt my head, I can see how a lot of the creative decisions might’ve made sense if the details hadn’t gotten so fucked up in the execution. I sincerely believe that these filmmakers had the best intentions, with deep appreciation and understanding for what made the first film so unique. But for whatever reason — likely a multitude of reasons — they simply couldn’t do it justice.

I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) commits the worst possible sin for any slasher horror film: It’s boring. There’s no subtlety, no suspense, no innovation in the kills, no reason to care about any of these characters, and no reason to believe that the final reveal will be satisfying. In fact, the final reveal commits the worst possible sin for any sequel: It retroactively makes the previous films worse. Seriously, when I think about the returning actors and what their characters did in this movie, I can only hope the paycheck was worth it.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Jennifer Kaytin Robinson dearly loved the original movie, but this film is proof positive that she is nowhere near worthy to make a slasher horror, much less take part in this franchise. Then again, it bears repeating that even the most experienced of filmmakers would have supreme difficulty wringing out a decent psychological suspense thriller into multiple films. And whether anyone likes it or not, this franchise has always been firmly and inescapably rooted in the kind of soul-crushing guilt that doesn’t make for good sequels.

Please let this franchise fucking die already. We’ve already erased the DTV third film from canon, let’s please keep the ’97 original and trash the rest.