JULY 18, 2025
GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)
Before I discuss the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, I should make something clear, since I never wrote a review of the original: I do not think the 1997 film is very good. There is a fantastic chase sequence with Sarah Michelle Gellar's character and I think Ryan Phillippe brings the movie to life whenever he's around, but otherwise I didn't think too much of it when I saw it on opening weekend, and time hasn't exactly helped. The mystery is a total wet fart (not to mention comes with a confusing motive: he's angry at them for thinking they killed the guy he actually killed?), the leads are as dull as you can find in one of these things (Gellar and Phillippe were the real draws, and they die while the blank slates live? Boooo), and it's just not all that fun, especially in rewatches. The best part of rewatching a good whodunit like Scream or My Bloody Valentine is seeing all the little clues you may have missed, something that's impossible with the OG I Know when the character isn't even mentioned until he shows up in the final reel.
Thankfully, this new one corrects that problem, and even adds a bit of unexpected ingenuity in its 3rd act that left me surprisingly finding it the better movie. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a "good" movie, but considering my not particularly high expectations and the fact that the mystery is actually more or less well constructed, I was legit stunned to walk out and think "I hope this is a hit so we can get another one that delivers on the teaser."
I'll get into that stuff later with a warning, but first, alas, I have to vent about a few issues. One is that the heroes bizarrely do NOTHING WRONG this time, which is a baffling choice for a script when you consider how the entire movie revolves around this one incident. This time around, our group (of five; there's basically a stand-in for each of the original characters plus another friend who tags along) has stopped on that same road to watch the fireworks, and the new Barry (Tyriq Withers as Teddy) walks out into the road to make a "I love you guys and here's to us!" kind of speech, only for a car to speed along the curve and go off the road when it swerves to avoid hitting him. Teddy and the others make every effort to pull the driver from the car before it falls off the cliff into the rocks below, but to no avail. It's a total freak accident that Teddy (and Teddy alone) could maybe feel guilty about, sure, but they certainly wouldn't be on the hook for "manslaughter" as one character shouts before they, as is the law, make a pact to never tell anyone about it... except for the cops that they call and see arriving just as they're driving away.
Anyway, we cut to a year later and the group dynamic has changed a bit: Teddy and Danica (Madelyn Cline/new Helen) are broken up and she's about to be married to another dude (rebound!), and her and Ava (Chase Sui Wonders/new Julie) aren't as close as they used to be, with that 5th friend, Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) taking up bestie role in her life. The new Ray is Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), who harbors a crush on Ava but doesn't seem to be able to pull the trigger. To the movie's credit, they do feel like a real friend group, but alas, none of them seem like folks I myself would want to hang out with. Well, maybe Stevie, since she works at a bar and thus could probably slip me a few free ones if I came in often enough.
But I'm an old! I'm here for Julie and Ray, right? Well, as anyone who has seen the trailer for this film can tell, they were clearly aping the structure (and thus hoping for the same success) as Scream 5, so it shouldn't surprise you that the legacy characters don't get introduced for a while. This is the correct move, to be clear, and a big part of why Scream 4 didn't really work for me: they let these new characters take center stage and make the movie their own *before* introducing our old friends. Scream 4 never let Jill, Kirby, etc. make this world their own before switching focus back to the people we already knew and (let's face it) wanted to be spending that time with, something they corrected with S5 and retained here. By the time Julie shows up (with Ray coming along a couple scenes later), we're already invested in this new group's plight, so it adds an extra level instead of feeling unfocused. And, again, I'm not a fan of their movie or them in particular, so honestly I didn't really care if they appeared or not, so I certainly wasn't getting impatient waiting for their appearance.
The main thrust here is that the town has become a big tourist destination, and Teddy's dad (the mayor or some other bigshot) has worked with the police to cover up these new things AND the original crimes from 1997, so that visitors wouldn't be scared of every fisherman that walks by. Julie has moved away and has put all this stuff behind her, but Ray still lives in Southpart, running a bar and annoyed that the town wants to forget the things that happened to him. I should note that in one of these conversations he says something like "This happened once before!" and I was annoyed that they were seemingly removing I Still Know from the canon (because it's happened *twice*), but thankfully I was wrong! Later on Ray makes a reference to it that almost seems more like a meta wink as opposed to actual acknowledgement, but without spoiling any particulars the film's events are brought up again later in a more concrete way, which delighted me since I also prefer THAT one to the original, thanks to its wacky cast (Jack Black! Jeffrey Combs! John Hawkes!) and faster pace.
As I mentioned, the mystery actually works this time. It's not hard to guess who the killer is, but that is certainly better than not being able to do so at all because they simply didn't exist in the story until they were revealed. I know Kevin Williamson was basically just riffing on Friday the 13th with the vengeful parent we never heard of thing (he couldn't copy the book's solution because the stalker there was two characters revealed to be one and the same to our non-seeing reader's eyes, which wouldn't work in a movie), so I get why he did it. But there's a crucial difference he didn't consider: in F13 no one is trying to figure out who the killer is, because they don't know there IS a killer until they're about to die anyway, so all the time we spend with Julie and Ray talking to Anne Heche and whoever else was all just useless padding and an unfair use of our detective brains. Here, the red herrings are fair game, something the OG never managed.
Plus many of them end up gruesomely murdered, so that's also a plus. AND they're spaced out evenly-ish, a vast improvement on the original which killed exactly one person in the first 70 minutes (Johnny Galecki) and then had the Fisherman wipe out the next (only other) four over a ten minute span. The body count here is, if my three day old memory is correct, eight (not including the car victim) and all but one of them are on-screen, which is a fair amount. Nothing overly spectacular, but there's a surprising viciousness to most that I appreciated, and unlike a certain other modern slasher, they commit to killing everyone - no unexplained epilogue "Oh they made it!" revivals.
Well, except for one, and now I gotta get into a spoiler. I don't really want to, but since it's kind of key to why I ended up giving the movie a pass I sort of have to. Skip the next paragraph if you don't want to know the reveal and also another weird thing about the movie's final scene!
OK, for those still here, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that there are two killers, since that's seemingly the law these days (at least it's ONLY two; Scream 6's *three* just seemed lazy to me). One is the one I said you can probably guess who it is, but the other was a legit surprise, because it was one of our two returning characters. And this worked great for me, a. because (once again!) I do not have any attachment to these people, so turning one of them into a killer is pretty much the only interesting thing about them as far as I'm concerned, and b. they were leaning so heavily into copying Scream 5's beats that having this kind of switcheroo legit worked as a shock to me, because I know that's something the Scream series will never have the stones to do. I know this choice has made die-hard fans furious, but that's the benefit of not being one! I thought it was great! But it also came with a bizarre choice, when this character said that the other killer (already dispatched) wasn't really dead. It seems like they're saying this to introduce that person returning with an explanation for how they lived, but they don't appear again. So it's just that OG character messing with our hero's head, right? Nope! In the very final scene, said hero tells another survivor "Oh, _____ is alive!" as casually as she might mention getting a new phone or something, and then the credits start! It's the weirdest goddamn thing, and my only guess is that they're just taking a shot at Scream's endless discussion of whether or not Stu actually survived.
Honestly if the whole movie had this weirdo/ballsy energy I would have been raving and trying to convince everyone to see it, but until that point it's merely fine (and yet, by default, the best of this four-film franchise, imo). It's got some funny lines here and there (a surprise nod to the AMC Nicole Kidman ad made me chuckle, and the aforementioned joke about I Still Know's plot left me practically wheezing) and decent slasher energy (the climax is set during the daylight too, which is pretty novel), but it's also got another group of mostly uninteresting kids, copying a few too many beats from not only Scream 5 (without which this movie wouldn't exist, let's face it) and its original, leaving it feeling more like a remake than a sequel. And the decision to stage their "crime" in such a way that would have left them with nothing more than a jaywalking ticket kept them from feeling guilty, which is part of the point of this kind of revenge story, so there's a disconnect as well. Maybe if they manage to get the promised sequel going (it'll make money, but nowhere near the levels of even the originals, let alone the new Screams) I'll check it out for sure, but honestly, I only really wanted this movie to be a hit so it would be more likely they'd revive my beloved Urban Legend as well. As amused as I was with the final reel of this one, I can't say I really NEED another trip to Southport in my lifetime.
What say you?
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