Title: I Know What You Did Last Summer
Describe This Movie In One Glass Onion Quote:
Benoit Blanc: He put pineapple juice in his drink! It’s so dumb.
Birdie Jay: It’s so dumb, it’s brilliant!
Benoit Blanc: No! It’s just dumb!
Brief Plot Synopsis: Dumbass kids do dumbass things, get murdered. Dumbasses.
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 1.5 wine spritzers out of 5.
Tagline: “You get the ending you deserve.”
Better Tagline: “Ending? This is the *fourth* movie.”
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Southport High School besties Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Danica (Madelyn Cline), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King) — also Ava’s ex, Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) have reunited a year after graduation for Danica and Teddy’s engagement party. The five go on a ride to watch the fireworks and inadvertently cause the death of a lone driver. Because teens are stupid, they elect to clam up about the accident. Fast forward another year, and someone has decided the five must pay for their transgression. With their LIVES.
“Critical” Analysis: Gather around the holographic campfire children. Let me tell you — no, put down the VR goggles and take out your ear implants, this is important — let me tell you about the Before Times. The era when slasher movies were entering their second wave and the internet hadn’t yet “advanced” to the point we could render Jennifer Love Hewitt naked using A.I.
The year was 1997. The world balanced on a razor’s edge wondering if Boris Yeltsin would survive his second term and if Ross and Rachel would recover from being “on a break.” It was also the year that saw the release of the original I Know What You Did Last Summer, a return to form of sorts for the slasher genre, which had lapsed into parody both unintentional (any of the latter era Friday the 13th movies) and less so (Scream).
It’s 30 years later and we’ve come close to something approaching a full circle. Horror parodies — again, intentional (Freaky, Happy Death Day) or not (the latest Halloween trilogy) — are as popular as ever. And everything old is new again, including a new take (the fourth, if you count the straight-to-DVD I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, which you shouldn’t) on the “Gorton’s Fisherman Gone Wild” franchise.
What sets this one (directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, who co-wrote with Sam Lansky) apart is that it just isn’t very good, even by franchise standards. Ava and her friends make what amount to the worst decisions possible at any given moment, sure, but the killer also has an uncanny ability to show up exactly where his victims are, hindsight about the eventual killer’s identity aside.
And it’s *boring*. IKWYDLS comes in at under two hours, and a lot of that is Ava and Danica bemoaning their fate, or getting up to potential sexytimes with Milo and Teddy when that was proven years ago to be a death sentence. Every potential victim also gets at least one or two licks in against the killer, then fail to close the deal.
Much will be made of the return of Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.), and they’re an admitted highlight, if for no other reason than to marvel that 1) Julie only moved 45 minutes away from the scene of the grisly killings, and 2) Ray never left!
You’d think local lore would be enough to convince kids from Southport — or Haddonfield, or Elm Street, or Derry, ME — to get the hell out of Dodge as soon as they’re old enough to form a hitchhiking thumb. Even beyond the usual slasher tropes, the idea of the youths seeking out the wise old survivors tracks, even if their actual usefulness varies.
Before long, the friends get whittled down. There’s another climax on a boat, and also a denouement that’s as poorly written as anything else in the movie before we get to a mid-credits scene, which — inexplicable as it is — is admittedly kind of cool.
Still, it’s hard to see this kicking off a new wave of IKWYDLS flicks. It seems more likely that people will instead come away not caring about the events of the previous year’s dog days.
Ask A 16-Year Old:
RFTED: What did we just watch?
16YO: How is everyone in Southport so skinny? I demand body positivity.
RFTED: I mean, Jennifer Love Hewitt isn’t that skinny.
16YO: No, she’s curvaceous.
RFTED: She sure is.
16YO: Ew, Dad.
I Know What You Did Last Summer is in theaters today.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
