I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (2025) is pretty much what I was hoping for: a traditional/formulaic slasher movie, sometimes slightly more clever than expected, sometimes dumb enough to get some laughs. It has a solid cast of fresh faces, just the right amount of “legacy sequel” characters (more than cameos, less than leads), and a couple fun surprises that I guess people didn’t care enough about to spoil for me even though I missed this in theaters. Thank you! I had a good time watching it at home with friends and a box of Jason Voorhees sponsored cider.
Like HALLOWEEN and SCREAM and almost TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE before it this is not a remake but a sequel that inexplicably has the same title as the original. It does feature a new group of young people who do a new cover up of a new car accident, but when they receive a note saying “I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER” and start getting killed by somebody dressed as a fisherman holding a hook they recognize this as something that happened before and they go to original main characters Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt, CAN’T HARDLY WAIT) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr., WING COMMANDER) for advice.
In the trailer this seemed like a ridiculous concept – what advice could they really give? (Unless it’s “Turn yourself in.”) There’s definitely a certain amount of DIE HARD 2 “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?” knowing absurdity at play. But the idea is that the fishing town of Southport, North Carolina has been gentrified and turned into a highly profitable resort town, and in the process information about the 1997 murders was scrubbed from the internet to protect their reputation. So trying to learn more about the crimes is the group’s only lead for figuring out who would by copying them now. Okay, I’ll go with it. (read the rest of this shit…)
I remember seeing I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER when it came out. I believe I enjoyed it for what it was – it had the appropriate ratio of competence to goofiness for a slick studio teen slasher sequel in the post-SCREAM era. I did not know or remember that it made less than the first film did on a bigger budget. Of course, this was 1998. They had not yet run over the home video industry, thrown it in the sea and vowed to never speak of it again, so that was where horror movies would thrive, and it at least made enough to justify a DTV sequel.
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER is a major pillar in the late ‘90s streak of newfangled glossy studio teen slasher movies. It was released less than a year after 
