I Know What You Did Last Summer

I feel instantly obscenely old when I realise that the original film on which this remake is based has just turned 28. I was already old when the original film, featuring Hollywood's most attractive tweens running around trying to avoid death by fish hook, was released, and even though everything old is being remade at the moment, this mess was one of the films I thought would be modernised last.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is basically just a hopelessly unimaginative mix of mostly Scream, but without the black humour or finesse of the first film, and a dashing of a lousy Halloween copy. Young people are hunted by a masked killer while we, the audience, sit and scratch our heads wondering who could be hiding behind the mask, or under the waistcoat in this case. The new version is produced by Sony, directed by the woman behind the Thor: Love and Thunder script, and the extremely few merits that existed in the original are gone. In the 1997 version, the premise is that a bunch of spoilt brats accidentally run over a homeless man who dies from his injuries, which they then cover up, lie about, and try to pretend never happened. The killer knows their terrible secret and, in a kind of frenzied revenge spree, intends to dismember all five high school kids.

In the new version, the utterly clueless Jennifer Kaytin Robinson fails to even copy the basic synopsis and, in an attempt to construct some kind of idiosyncratic original premise, misunderstands the killer's simple motive and the teenagers' tormented secrecy. This is because they no longer happen to run over a tramp and then cover it up, but because the start of this hopeless new version involves a reckless pickup driver who demonstrably drives 100 km/h too fast in an old flatbed truck on a pitch-black coastal road and, through his own carelessness, ends up killing himself. This happens after all five young people have tried to save him, using a couple of different methods. In this way, the setup for the events that follow feels almost absurd, because in this case, "I Know What You Did Last Summer" is basically just about spoilt young people trying to save a speed-crazy drunk who killed himself.

The rest of this film is utterly repulsive. The young people offer the same kind of sharpness in their acting as if I was put in the role, and the number of unimaginative, tired, stupid scenes with roaring, crying young women running for their lives but doing so at 4 km/h and stumbling over every carpet edge reaches new heights here. If you want to see a terrible remake of an already nonsensical slasher film that no one ever cared about, this is definitely the film for you.