I Know What You Did Last Summer

Belated sequel to the derivative and half-forgotten horror potboiler about a group of teens who cover up a deadly car accident, but are pursued a year later by their own collective guilt, and more immediately by a mysterious killer with a hook for a hand.

This new entry’s nostalgia for traditional slasher tropes is not limited to the predictable cinematic techniques of jump scares and visual misdirection in the name of suspense; it even treats casual sex and drug use with a weaponised moralism by which these ‘naughty’ youths must be capitally punished for their misdemeanours.

The sunny oceanside setting seems idyllic by day, all moored boats and vaguely decadent parties in the playground of the well-to-do. But at night there’s enough contrast in the lighting to paint the scenery in a more disturbing shade, because that’s when a lot of the trouble starts.

The story seeks to get under the emotional skin of its characters, although their personalities have barely a dimension or even a trait between them. One of them’s a bit short-tempered, another one is a bit shallow, the main one is likeably level-headed – but they’re all united in a shared impulse to get high (which is more of a nod to horror flicks of the 1980s than those of the better-behaved 1990s) and in not wanting to get murdered, which is something almost anyone can relate to.

We first encounter the main fivesome swapping witty banter at a social event, as if the majority of the audience is going to give a tinker’s cuss about them beyond their hopefully creative deaths. They are well cast, assuming the director was desperately seeking lookalikes for the twentysomething actors in the original movie. But ultimately, they’re just an identikit gang of friends who are about to bond over a very intense experience, shortly before being torn apart by it once and for all.

Gabbriette Bechtel is one of the few sources of genuine charisma, chewing on the role of a ghoulish podcaster whose curiosity leads her into the heart of her new friends’ ordeal like so much bubblegum. Then Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr turn up to provide a little middle-aged, lived-in gravitas, presumably in the interest of making veterans of the original ‘feel seen’ and of widening the target audience as much as possible.

The writers use the consequence-heavy tragedy of plot point one to let them all off the hook somewhat (no pun intended), jumping through an extra moral hoop so that they haven’t actually killed someone. Thus the not-quite-unanimous decision to keep the accident a secret takes on more narrative weight, especially in an era when ‘the truth’ has become a disputed concept, stretched to uselessness by warring factions of opinion in the real world, although the idea ends up a red herring in the actual film.

Most importantly of all, the executions are executed with brutal efficiency and a smattering of style, balancing out the self-aware humour and half-hearted attempts at thematic depth through armchair psychoanalysis with some pleasingly nasty, if not all that gory, moments.

Nobody seems to have asked for a remake, reboot or indeed ‘legacy sequel’ to a pretty bog-standard slasher that’s only grown in obscurity since its 1997 release. Now that it’s here anyway, it strives until its legs break to straddle two main assignments: exhuming rotten horror tropes that were mocked to death a generation ago, and filling cinema seats with the bums of enough thrill-seeking teens to transfuse fresh blood into a long-exhausted franchise.

Artistically it’s as welcome as a sharp object in a vital organ, but commercially it’ll entertain the terminally unimaginative and just about satisfy die-hard fans of good old-fashioned mindless violence.

-Stew Mott-