There is not any maintaining a just right killer down. If there may be something slasher motion pictures have taught us within the many years they have been hacking throughout our film monitors it is that it isn’t important how repeatedly you shoot ’em within the head – they are at all times stoning up for yet another scare. Or years’ price of extra scares, even. And with the hot revival of the Scream franchise it was once just a topic of time sooner than different entries within the past due ’90s slasher increase slipped into their ol’ rain slickers and were given again to doing what they do very best.
Input I Know What You Did Remaining Summer season, Do Revenge director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s a laugh, frisky, and diabolically foolish legacy sequel to Jim Gillespie and Kevin Williamson’s identically-titled 1997 movie. Precisely just like the 2022 Scream “re-quel” we are right here offered to a recent crop of lovely younger issues who all of sudden to find themselves on a particularly recognizable killer’s slicing block. And just like the Woodsboro teenagers, those youths will have to additionally hunt down the battle-scarred survivors of the sooner franchise (our outdated buddies Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr) to decipher whodunit, sooner than all of them to find themselves fish meals.
Even with its personal hook, I Know What You Did Remaining Summer season at all times lived in Scream‘s gigantic ghost-faced shadow, so it is only proper and fair for the brand new movie to move forward and include such xeroxed shenanigans. It is fully true to the spirit of the franchise. Alternatively, it does be offering a brand new surprises.
I Know What You Did Remaining Summer season places a brand new youngster gang at the hook
Ava (Chase Sui Wonders) takes at the Fisherman.
Credit score: Matt Kennedy / Sony Photos
Regardless of technically being a sequel to 1998’s I Nonetheless Know What You Did Remaining Summer season, 2025’s I Know What You Did Remaining Summer season kicks issues off with a primary act that would possibly have you ever questioning if we aren’t simply gazing a full-on remake of the unique. Gang of teenagers events within the fishing village of Southport, North Carolina. Gang of teenagers by chance kills anyone. Gang of teenagers covers it up and makes a pact to by no means talk of it once more till gang of teenagers begins getting hunted down through a hook-wielding maniac with a predilection for fancy stationery. You already know, the best hits. Usual!
In Robinson’s movie, the core gang has been elderly up. Of their mid-twenties, those are former highschool besties reuniting for the engagement celebration in their maximum esteemed (i.e. wealthy as hell) buddies. First, we meet Ava (the extraordinarily likeable Chase Sui Wonders from Our bodies Our bodies Our bodies), arriving again in her haunted place of origin of Southport, after a couple of years away. The object is, Southport ain’t so cursed anymore. The many years since we had been remaining right here within the unique movie gazing youngsters placed on ice had been extraordinarily just right to the city. It is now a shining jewel of the Japanese seaboard, most commonly due to the vulturish actual property efforts of the mega-wealthy Grant Spencer (Billy Campbell). He swooped in when costs had been low (because of that aforementioned youngster slaughtering) and gave where a correct glow up. (Horror films and actual lifestyles agree: actual property builders will at all times be the true villains.)
It is Grant’s strapping son Teddy (Tyriq Withers, Do not Inform Mother the Babysitter’s Useless) who is getting hitched — or because the banner above the celebration’s front places it, “hooked,” wink wink — to former attractiveness queen and Ava’s BFF Danica (Outer Banks‘ Madelyn Cline). Upload on Ava’s former flame Milo (Jonah Hauer-King, The Little Mermaid‘s Prince Eric) and everyone’s estranged townie good friend Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon, Tiny Gorgeous Issues) who is rapidly operating the celebration. We have now now been offered to our new core gang, a few of whom will clearly now not make it out of this the city alive.
This slasher requel loves to swerve when we do not be expecting it
A well-recognized scene…or is it?
Credit score: Brook Rushton / Sony Photos
Like the unique I Know What You Did Remaining Summer season, a hit-and-run seals the fates of the movie’s characters. Alternatively, this new edition of the well-known scene performs out with surprises, giving us our first style of the smorgasbord of methods Robinson’s were given up her directorial sleeve. Her script (co-written through Sam Lansky and Leah McKendrick) is simply playful sufficient with our expectancies to stay issues vigorous, marching to its personal loony beat even whilst stepping via acquainted tracks. It is a remix of types, figuring out what we wish and completely giving us a large number of precisely that, however in tactics bizarre sufficient to stay us guessing. Past due within the movie, one personality would possibly exclaim “Nostalgia’s puffed up!” however the film does not skimp on it. It simply tweaks it just a little, sufficient for some a laugh instances.
Mashable Best Tales
The truth that Robinson’s movie is cribbing from Jaws simply up to it’s from the ’90s slasher franchise it is re-doing will have to be a sign that this ain’t your cool auntie’s identical I Know What You Did Remaining Summer season. As an example, wealthy guy Spencer’s oligarchical tactics would possibly paintings within the youngsters’ desire in relation to overlaying up their vehicular manslaughter. However as their previous comes again to hang-out them within the type of that hook-wielding psychopath together with his all-caps handwritten threats, Spencer’s want to stay his crown jewel of a group conspiracy-free manner the children can not believe his in-pocket police pressure to assist. They are too busy waving their hands pronouncing “Not anything to look right here!” to look the our bodies piling up in the back of them.
The children are alright in I Know What You Did Remaining Summer season (aside from for that knife of their again)
Madelyn Cline as Danica.
Credit score: Matt Kennedy / Sony Photos
It is refreshing to look how really likeable maximum of our primary characters are in I Know What You Did Remaining Summer season. That was once most commonly true within the unique movie as neatly — Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) ceaselessly! However it is vital taking into consideration how keenly targeted the 1997 movie was once on its primary foursome; screenwriter Kevin Williamson was once mainly turning in a model of his personal Dawson’s Creek with gentle bloodletting. The brand new I Know What You Did Remaining Summer season maintains a large number of that sense of dialed-in intimacy. It is 100% keyed into who those youngsters are, so even if they are being dumb, the film celebrates them for it. Or no less than empathizes. And that’s the reason evidently great to revel in when such a lot of of those films can not seem to stand their very own characters.
That is very true in Wonders and Cline’s portrayal of the connection between Ava and Danica, very best pals who by no means pass over an opportunity to inform each and every different how a lot they love one any other, even if the force in their deceitful historical past weighs on them. Slashers ceaselessly chorus, to their detriment, from making us care an excessive amount of about characters as a result of they’re, through style’s definition, meat for the grinder. All of the hacking and stabbing can prevent being entertaining if we care an excessive amount of in regards to the hacked and slashed. However there’s a needle to be threaded in making us root for the protagonists, and Robinson and her actors thread it neatly. Because of this, we (whaddyaknow) to find ourselves further scared for those youngsters discovering themselves in consistent unspeakable threat. Everyone wins!
It is the weirdness the place I Know What You Did Remaining Summer season actually wins out
THEY’RE BAAACK.
Credit score: Matt Kennedy / Sony Photos
The object in regards to the I Know What You Did Remaining Summer season franchise that at all times made it stand sufficient except for Scream and the opposite ’90s slashers to thrive was once its bizarre little swerves — Anne Heche and her taxidermy farm someone? Or what about Hewitt’s actually unusual apocryphal tale about a real kid writing and directing her notorious “What are you looking forward to, huh?” second?
Fortunately, Robinson nails that left-field whackadoo vibe as neatly. There are miniature subplots involving a bisexual horror podcaster (Gabbriette Bechtel) dressed in covetable Helen Shivers merch, a cult-like pastor (Austin Nichols) maintaining a serial-killer-ish scrapbook, and do not even get me began at the dream series that drew spontaneous applause from my target audience. The phrase “trauma” is uttered right here as repeatedly as Jamie Lee Curtis landed it in her Halloween press run, however come what may it really works as a blessed, figuring out laugh-line. There may be simply sufficient winking happening to make it cross down simple, leaving the heaviness of so-called “increased horror” to the previous.
Nowhere is that extra obtrusive within the go back of Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. as I Know What You Did Remaining Summer season‘s unique survivors, Julie and Ray. Like Neve Campbell, Courteney Bass Cox, and David Arquette in Scream, those actors have sat with the legacy of the unique movie for two decades, and soar proper again into it with the easiest mixture of seriousness and goofiness. Julie and Ray have lots to show the following technology about surviving — now not simply nice large hooks flying at their faces, however embracing style silliness in its purest shape.
Right here, Robinson’s movie leans into the thrill of horror legacy, taking part in to the strengths of the ’90s unique and throwing curveballs at a brand new technology. It is all a finding out procedure: when lifestyles stabs you, you strike a pose for your dressmaker denims and antique rock tee and stab it the hell again, child.
I Know What You Did Remaining Summer season opens in theaters July 18.
