After 30 years, followers can breathe a sigh of aid – Julie James and Ray Bronson are again! Now, “Who’re Julie James and Ray Bronson…and what followers?” I hear you ask. These are minor quibbles within the larger image: for some motive they’ve put collectively a legacy sequel to Jim Gillespie’s 1997 slasher underdog, I Know What You Did Final Summer season.
It’s troublesome to know why this model of I Know What You Did Final Summer season was made – the bubble for horror legacy sequels has successfully burst after limitless, largely unhealthy iterations. Had this been greenlit six months later, it could have possible been a laborious reboot; as an alternative, we get an odd, ungainly hybrid with an id disaster. As within the unique, right here a new group of scorching younger individuals by accident kill a man in a automobile accident on the Fourth of July and swear one another to secrecy. A yr later, a masked fisherman rocks up on the town wielding a huge hook to actual his revenge… however this time the group can flip to the unique 90s survivors, Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr), for assist.
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It’s a unusual, sporadically entertaining mix of much more concepts than you’d anticipate from, effectively, an I Know What You Did Final Summer season legacy sequel. Director and author Jennifer Kaytin Robinson grapples with wellness tradition, gentrification, institutional misogyny and the life altering results of trauma, all of the whereas executing a few of the most loyal fan service I’ve ever seen to 2 movies from the late 90s and early 00s that not many individuals keep in mind, not to mention care about. At the same time as somebody who adores the unique movie (to the purpose that one facet character’s shared surname with the primary movie’s director didn’t go unnoticed) it’s nonetheless mind-boggling that this unusual not-quite-reboot made it to display. That is Avengers: Endgame for a principally unbeloved 90s slasher – there’s fairly actually a mid-credits scene with Jennifer Love Hewitt in Nick Fury drag teeing up a sequel. The audience is me, a couple of my pals, and possibly 40 to 50 different individuals on planet Earth.
Because it makes so little sense to do a slavish legacy sequel for I Know What You Did Final Summer season of all properties, it offers Robinson intensive wiggle room to do no matter she desires. Scream, its spoiled cousin, is a roundly beloved franchise and was too necessary to screw up or basically meddle with once they introduced it again in 2022. I Know What You Did Final Summer season strikes out in much more compelling methods than that Scream sequel – which buckled beneath the burden of its ouroboric meta narrative – ever did.
If I Know What You Did Final Summer season has loftier ambitions than the typical slasher, these are fatally cramped by the restrictions of the IP sandbox it’s taking part in in. The movie violently seesaws between paying homage to the unique and carving its personal path, with Robinson taking some huge swings and misses a number of of them for purely technical causes. The featherweight script (co-written with Sam Lansky) is simply too unserious to promote the movie’s absurd, intense finale, and the pair have a robust affinity for tin-eared ‘ladies rule, boys drool’ feminism, peppering in baffling, totally unironic traces about how all the movie’s massacre might have been prevented “if males simply went to remedy.” This doesn’t cohere with any of the characters’ established personalities and creates tonal street bumps for the movie. The path leaves a lot to be desired too; when the movie veers into horror territory, with frequent off-screen kills and sometimes incoherent motion, it gives little of the unique’s gripping rigidity.
None of it actually is smart – each the plot when you consider it (a few scenes really feel like lively plot holes in gentle of the killer’s id) and the sheer truth this movie bought made. The unique movie is remembered for being a refreshingly uncomplicated slasher in regards to the period’s largest stars hooking up and getting hooked to demise, so there’s not a lot of a tone or a vibe to copy. But Robinson, a diehard fan, does her damndest, and the solid, specifically Gabbriette and Madelyn Cline, properly evoke the unique solid’s charisma and preternatural attractiveness. The entire effort is admirable in a surrealist approach – there’s one dream sequence that feels such as you’ve huffed paint – however this degree of fealty to an IP in all probability isn’t wholesome within the lengthy time period.
