I Know What You Did Last Summer (United States, 2025)

I recognize the financial importance of nostalgia in today's movie business, especially when it comes to horror "franchises". There will always be return engagements for Michael Meyers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Kruger. But The Gorton's Fisherman? Dumb and lame in its 1997 conception for I Know What You Did Last Summer and even dumber in the 1998 sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (which should have been called I Still Know What You Did Two Summers Ago), The Gorton's Fisherman is among the least terrifying horror "icons." 

In resurrecting this defunct series, director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (who also shares a screenwriting credit with Sam Lansky) has elected not only to exhume the big screen careers of Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddy Prinze Jr. but also to imitate the bad writing of the '90s duology. I'm not going to complain about all the horror cliches, because those are de rigeur, but the idiocy is more than surface-deep in this movie; it's to the bone. The movie is also terminally uninteresting. During one scene, my attention wandered to the point where I was wondering whether bath bombs really come in that color (a gaudy crimson) and whether such an intense hue might leave a residue on the skin. Meanwhile, downstairs, the first victim is about to be harpooned. 

I'll admit up front that the narrative contains the kernel of a potentially interesting idea about PTSD taken to extremes. However, its failure to develop this in favor of venturing down the "mystery killer" highway slaughters any chance I Know What You Did Last Summer could have had at being more than a pointless regurgitation. Throw in a chatty final fifteen minutes, an annoying return from the dead, and a bizarre mid-credits scene, and the movie doesn't merely jump the shark; it jumps a whole shiver of them. In a weird way, I'm almost impressed that a movie can go this far wrong in such a short span. It's as if every choice made during the final quarter-hour is precisely the wrong one. 

The main storyline focuses on five twentysomething friends – Danica (Madelyn Cline), Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), and Teddy (Tyriq Withers) – who decide to take in a July 4 fireworks show from the side of a super-windy road. When Teddy's ill-advised antics cause a pickup to swerve and crash through a guardrail, the friends are torn between hanging around for the cops to arrive or disappearing to save their reputations. In choosing the latter, they open up a can of resentment and guilt that boils over a year later when Danica unseals an envelope at her bridal shower that contains a note: "I Know What You Did Last Summer." Shortly thereafter, a body count begins – although it starts not with any of the five principals but with secondary characters who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Similarities between these killings and those that happened 28 years earlier bring the survivors of the 1997 massacre, ex-husband and wife Ray Bronson (Freddy Prinze Jr.) and Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), out of hibernation. Julie offers a succinct "get him before he gets you" piece of advice to Ava when the latter tracks her down. Ray, meanwhile, who still lives and toils in Southport, acts as a father figure to Stevie. 

It was probably hoping too much that I Know What You Did Last Summer might leap over the low bar established by its predecessors. After all, if Final Destination: Bloodlines could do it for that franchise, why not this one? Alas, Robinson's movie flip-flops back and forth between being inept and goofy. Although there's plenty of blood, there's little evidence of variety or creativity in the killings. Jump-scares, which are infrequent, lack punch, and the sex-scene has a PG-13 level of explicitness despite the movie being rated R. 

When it comes to this franchise, I have consistently been wrong about box office potential so I'm not going to predict whether 2025 audiences will be mesmerized by the concept of an advertising icon-lookalike using his hook to slice-and-dice his way through targets of his irrational ire. From now on, it's strictly Mrs. Paul's for me.

I Know What You Did Last Summer (United States, 2025)