I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) A Legacy Sequel Soaked in Nostalgia, Gutted by Its Own Hook

Let's rewind to 1997, back when the original I Know What You Did Last Summer was the Diet Coke of slashers—fizzy, formulaic, strangely addictive. It wasn't clever like Scream (even though Kevin Williamson wrote both), but it had a sleek, straightforward charm. A summer campfire story with teeth. The premise was beautifully simple: you hit a man with your car, you cover it up, and then something with a hook comes calling. Clean. Brutal. Effective.
Now, nearly 30 years later, in an age where no IP can truly die and every streaming service has become a graveyard for reboots, someone looked at that elegant simplicity and thought, "You know what this needs? Complications."

The film opens with a fresh-faced group of Gen Z partygoers—Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Danica (Madelyn Cline), Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and ex-boyfriend Milo (Jonah Hauer-King)—returning to a now-gentrified Southport, North Carolina for an engagement party. And here's where the first crack in the foundation appears: the original film understood that its central tragedy worked because it struck at a moment of maximum vulnerability. Those characters were eighteen, on the cusp of everything—graduation behind them, college ahead, their entire futures balanced on a knife's edge. When they made that awful decision to cover up the accident, you understood the terrible logic: they were young, they had plans, they had everything to lose. Ray's desperate plea—that he didn't have their family or money to recover from something like this—gave weight to their panic.

This version strips away all that emotional architecture and replaces it with an engagement on the Fourth of July. They pull over at a corner called—and I kid you not—Reaper's Curve to better view the fireworks. Someone pulls out a joint and then Teddy decides to play chicken with an oncoming car. This causes the driver to swerve off a cliff and vanish into the ocean.

But the screenwriter wasn't content to just strip away the emotional foundation—they also decided to "fix" the actual mechanics of the tragedy. In the original, the characters hit a man. You saw the impact. You felt the panic. It was dumb, yes—but cleanly dumb. In this version, our protagonists don't even technically kill anyone. They try to save him, bicker about responsibility, and then agree to hush it all up when Teddy's rich dad offers a clean-up crew.

It's the narrative equivalent of watching someone try to tie their shoes with oven mitts: awkward, confused, and ultimately pointless. What's lost isn't just the poetry of that original moment—it's the entire emotional foundation that made the cover-up feel tragically human rather than simply stupid. The moral stakes have been drained away like blood from a corpse, leaving a premise that's more TikTok true crime reenactment than Hitchcockian guilt spiral.

But let's talk about the real horror here—legacy. The film desperately wants to reproduce the success of Scream 5, complete with slick visuals, brutal kills, and Gen Z flavour text. But it lacks the tonal self-awareness, the character archetypes, and most importantly, the reason to exist beyond shareholder appeasement.

Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. return as Julie and Ray, now divorced and drained, serving as cryptic boomer oracles for the new blood. Hewitt does what she can with what little she's given. Prinze Jr., on the other hand, is clearly giving it his all—and that's somehow worse. This isn't phoning it in; this is earnest effort that lands with the grace of a concrete balloon. In the original films, his stunted wooden presence found balance alongside Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe, blending into an ensemble where his limitations could hide in plain sight. Here, as the grizzled older character carrying emotional weight, those same limitations are magnified under a harsh spotlight. He's the old guy who still hasn't learned to act, and twenty-five years later, it's more noticeable than ever. The man has all the emotional range of an overcooked potato, and in a film that desperately needed someone—anyone—with gravitas, his wooden presence becomes almost aggressively distracting.

Chase Sui Wonders carries the film with an empathetic and confident central performance, and Ava is notably the only member of the group to insist on doing the right thing, facing a fascinating emotional burden that the writers frustratingly fail to explore. Madelyn Cline demonstrates excellent comedic timing and delivers an impressive horror performance, particularly in a subtle, hysterical response to the killer's first letter—downplaying her panic while performing composure in front of a crowd. The problem isn't their talent; it's what they're given to work with.

The film devolves into shameless pandering toward its perceived demographic, drowning in internet references and buzzword-fueled dialogue. Take a shot whenever characters say something obnoxiously gen Z like "diva," "nepo baby," or reference therapy and you'll be crawling out of the theatre with a full bladder and bloodshot eyes. Neither Cline's dialogue nor her jokes live up to her comedic timing, and Wonders' character arc gets buried under algorithmic attempts at relevance. The remaining cast members—largely uninteresting or serving purely as eye candy—pale next to the clear (if basic) archetypes of the original. When you compare them to Ryan Phillippe's macho swagger or Sarah Michelle Gellar's diva energy, this ensemble feels like beautiful, barely distinguishable placeholders auditioning for the same Instagram campaign.

There is a hint of something more lurking beneath the surface. The film gestures vaguely at interesting themes—trauma, guilt, the gentrification of Southport as a stand-in for generational erasure and privilege. There's potential here, the beginnings of a real idea. But every time it gets close to saying something, it chickens out and sprints back into the safe arms of nostalgia. The film's "double bluff" twist could've been genuinely tragic or emotionally resonant if the movie had the courage to commit to its new ideas. Instead, it punts the football straight into a remember-this? pile and calls it a win.
It's as if the script was written by a fan and then rewritten by an algorithm. It winks. It nudges. It references the original so many times you half expect a studio exec to pop up mid-scene and scream, "Do you remember yet?!"

 
There's a dream-sequence cameo that's actually kind of fun, in a fan-servicey, "oh hey!" sort of way. But it's also entirely unnecessary—a glossy, awkward insert that only exists to make you clap like a seal. It's emblematic of the film's broader problems, but it's nothing compared to what comes next. The third act of IKWYDLS 2025 is a slow-motion car crash of bad decisions, laughable twists, and fan-service so indulgent it feels like someone dared the director to write a Reddit thread in screenplay format. There's a mid-credits scene that plays like the unholy lovechild of Marvel Studios and Wattpad. Even the kills—the bread and butter of any slasher—lack bite. The legendary Slicker returns, coat and hook intact, but without any real menace. He stomps around like he's just here to fulfill a union quota, delivering impressive gore and violence that somehow lacks impact without the underlying threat to give it weight. The most effective scares don't even come from the killer—they're micro-flashbacks that rely on blasts of sound and sudden volume changes rather than any real fear or tension. It's a cheap ploy that feels less like horror and more like someone accidentally sitting on the remote.

Which brings us to the big question that haunts every legacy sequel like a particularly persistent ghost: Who is this movie for?

Is it aimed at Gen Z audiences who don't know (or care) about the '97 original, but are expected to laugh at buzzword-heavy dialogue about therapy, vaping, and astrology? Or is it for the nostalgia-hungry millennials who do know the original—and are now just old enough to resent being pandered to?
The truth is, it's for no one. In trying to straddle both worlds, it satisfies neither. The Gen Z crowd won't care about old characters they've never heard of. And the older crowd will wonder why they're being treated like a focus group that still thinks the word "iconic" means something.
This is the problem plaguing modern studio horror—and really, franchise cinema at large. We've entered an age where nostalgia has become both the marketing strategy and the creative vision, where unique ideas are choked to death by fan expectations, shareholder anxiety, and algorithmic storytelling. Studios are stuck in a loop, trying to placate older fans who can't move on, while also luring in younger fans who don't care about moving backward. It's an impossible balance. And it's killing potential.

But the real tragedy? This didn't have to suck. Beneath the studio notes and safe choices, there was potential. A few moments glimmer—enough to remind you that this franchise once had teeth. I didn't hate this movie. I was just... disappointed. I wanted it to succeed. I wanted it to finally step out of Scream's shadow and find its own voice. To show a new generation that I Know What You Did Last Summer could mean something again.

Instead, it settled for being the horror equivalent of karaoke—technically on-key, but soulless. And maybe that's the real horror here. Not the hook. Not the blood. Not even Freddie Prinze Jr trying to act. But the creeping sense that this is what nostalgia has done to us: squeezed out originality, suffocated risk, and replaced genuine reinvention with cinematic necromancy.

What I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) ends up being is not a revival, but a reenactment. A ritual. The same story, watered down and dressed in new clothes, delivered with a nervous smile and a twitchy eye toward the box office.

In the end, I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) isn't a catastrophe. It's worse: it's a product. It has some decent performances, a few gory kills, and a whole lot of brand management. It's too sincere to be parody, too hollow to be homage, and too obsessed with its own legacy to build anything new.

I know what they did last summer. They made this. And for what? Another sequel no one will remember next summer.

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