I Know What You Did Last Summer Trailer Looks About How You’d Expect
The remake monster continues to make the movie vault rounds, and now, it’s come upon I Know What You Did Last Summer. The original was a slasher movie from the 90s that rode the Scream wave to box office success – enough to get a sequel called I Still Know What You Did Last Summer made (which really should have been called I Still Know What You Did Two Summers Ago, but that’s not the biggest logical misstep these films made). The first movie, very loosely based on a young adult book by Lois Duncan, was about a group of friends (Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Ryan Phillipe) who get drunk on the Fourth of July and accidentally run over a man on the highway. They throw the body into the sea and swear never to reveal what happened, but next summer, one of them gets a note saying, “I Know What You Did Last Summer;” then, the killing begins (or continues, if you count the guy these dopey kids hit with their car, which… well, I don’t want to ruin it in case you haven’t seen it and are inclined to do so). Now, Sony is releasing another one of those far-removed sequels that infuriatingly has the same title as the original, and today, they released a trailer, which you can watch below:
The I Know What You Did Last Summer trailer makes this one look like a remake since the story appears to be exactly the same, only with a new bunch of kids. Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. are back as Julie James and Ray Bronson (I had to look up his last name), but they look like they have glorified cameos, much like Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott in the awful Scream 5 (I’m not calling that trash Scream, no matter what the title is). But once more, a bunch of kids run someone over on the highway and get rid of the body, then they get a note saying, “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” and a guy dressed like a fisherman with a slicker that conveniently leaves his face in shadow comes after them with a hook. It looks like the most boring thing they could have done with it, not that they probably had a lot of options other than… you know… make something else. The pedigree this time is not exactly reassuring; the new I Know What You Did Last Summer is directed and co-written by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, who was involved in a few things I don’t think anyone’s ever heard of and co-wrote Thor: Love and Thunder, which is atrocious. And the inclusion of Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. seems to be there just to have the survivors of the old ones show up. What could they possibly do to help the newbies? Are they being hunted by the same fisherman? That makes no sense, and even if that were the case, I don’t see how the previous escaped victims could help them much. “Try not to get gutted with his hook” is about the best advice they can offer.
But, then, I’m probably thinking about this too much. I Know What You Did Last Summer came out when I was in high school, and I enjoyed it at the time, mostly because Scream had gotten me interested in slashers, Buffy Summers was in it, and Jennifer Love Hewitt was fun to look at. I hadn’t seen it in years, but I watched it at a friend’s house this past Halloween because he’d never seen it. And it’s okay, although it doesn’t make a lot of sense when you find out who the killer is (and I really don’t know why he killed any of the other people he got his hook into), the characters are nothing special, and it’s nowhere near as good as Scream, the reason for its existence, despite being written by Scream’s creator, Kevin Williamson. This is the kind of movie for which a remake doesn’t seem like a sacrilege, and despite inserting a couple of cameos to make it a sequel, this is really just a remake. Aside from Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr., the only cast member I recognize is Billy Campbell, and I’m sure he’s playing somebody’s dad (or the killer, I guess). I expect almost nothing from this movie, and the I Know What You Did Last Summer trailer assures me that’s the right attitude.
Let us know what you thought of the I Know What You Did Last Summer trailer in the comments!
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