By Jake Wilson
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
★★
MA. 111 minutes. In cinemas
Like many young horror fans, I raced to see I Know What You Did Last Summer when it came out in 1997. But it proved a letdown, especially compared to the massively successful Scream, scripted by the same writer, Kevin Williamson, the previous year.
Jonah Hauer-King, Sarah Pidgeon, Chase Sui Wonders, Madelyn Cline and Tyriq Withers face a horrific dilemma.
Where Scream broke the fourth wall with the regularity of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, this hasty follow-up was just another slasher movie, with a single gimmick given away in the title. The victims lined up for the slaughter are being punished for their role in a hit-and-run accident – so while we’re not precisely invited to side with the killer, there’s a sense in which they had it coming.
The advantage of remaking this kind of film is that it’s not too hard to improve on the original. But the new I Know What You Did is disappointing in its own right, even though the director and co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson has a few more ideas than Williamson (like him, she disregards the nominal source material, a 1973 young adult novel by Lois Duncan that barely qualifies as horror).
Although it’s not evident straight away, the movie is not a remake but a “legacy sequel”, taking place in the same fictional universe as its predecessors (there’a brief shout-out to the 1998 I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, in which the survivors of the first instalment go through it all again in the Bahamas).
In the tourist town of Southport, North Carolina, the roads are still slippery, the police are still useless, and history appears to be repeating. Once again, a group of young people with everything to live for are implicated in a fatal accident and decide to walk away. And once again, rough justice is meted out by a hook-wielding killer whose intentions are announced in scrawled anonymous messages.
But the very fact that this has happened before adds a layer of Scream-like self-awareness. Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), who survived the ordeal the first time round, has become an academic specialising in trauma, though it’s her practical experience that comes in handy when the heroine Ava (Chase Sui Wonders) and her friends show up in search of advice.
The movie has a whole knowing retro side: I would bank on Robinson being a fan of Heathers and Wild Things, and there’s even a touch of Jaws, via the character of a bigwig real estate developer (Billy Campbell), whose main concern seems to be how the killings will affect his income.
Jennifer Love Hewitt, who played the original film’s final girl, Julie James.
Other touches are more 21st-century, albeit in a way that dates itself instantly, like the references to podcasting and cryptocurrency, or the effort to maintain a “sex-positive stance” in contrast to the perceived puritanism of horror in the past.
That last endeavour backfires to a degree, given that even the characters who don’t wind up dying horribly are put through a nightmarish ordeal with the implication they’ve brought this upon themselves.
Or have they? The revelation of the killer’s identity and motives makes even less sense than these things usually do – and by the finale, the script has veered away almost entirely from the idea of deserved comeuppance in its haste to set up a sequel.
That in turn might not have been a problem, if the hints of a grander design – like a cover of a Daniel Johnston song on the soundtrack, or some nudging dialogue about the Fourth of July – amounted to more than hints. Perhaps Robinson’s original script had a bit more edge. But despite a fair amount of gore, the filmmakers are all too intent on letting themselves off the hook.
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