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 in the larger image: for some purpose they’ve put collectively a legacy sequel to Jim Gillespie’s 1997 slasher underdog, I Know What You Did Last Summer.
It’s troublesome to know why this model of I Know What You Did Last Summer was made – the bubble for horror legacy sequels has successfully burst after limitless, largely unhealthy iterations. Had this been greenlit six months later, it will have doubtless been a laborious reboot; as an alternative, we get an odd, ungainly hybrid with an id disaster. As in the authentic, right here a new group of scorching younger individuals by chance kill a man in a automotive 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 massive hook to actual his revenge… however this time the group can flip to the authentic 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, nicely, an I Know What You Did Last Summer legacy sequel. Director and author Jennifer Kaytin Robinson grapples with wellness tradition, gentrification, institutional misogyny and the life altering results of trauma, all 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 bear in mind, not to mention care about. At the same time as somebody who adores the authentic movie (to the level that one facet character’s shared surname with the first 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 largely unbeloved 90s slasher – there may be fairly actually a mid-credits scene with Jennifer Love Hewitt in Nick Fury drag teeing up a sequel. The target market is me, a couple of my associates, and perhaps 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 Last Summer of all properties, it provides 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 essentially meddle with once they introduced it again in 2022. I Know What You Did Last Summer strikes out in much more compelling methods than that Scream sequel – which buckled below the weight of its ouroboric meta narrative – ever did.
If I Know What You Did Last Summer has loftier ambitions than the common slasher, these are fatally cramped by the limitations of the IP sandbox it’s enjoying in. The movie violently seesaws between paying homage to the authentic and carving its personal path, with Robinson taking some massive swings and misses a number of of them for purely technical causes. The featherweight script (co-written with Sam Lansky) is just too unserious to promote the movie’s absurd, intense finale, and the pair have a sturdy affinity for tin-eared ‘ladies rule, boys drool’ feminism, peppering in baffling, fully unironic strains about how the total movie’s massacre may have been averted “if males simply went to remedy.” This doesn’t cohere with any of the characters’ established personalities and creates tonal highway bumps for the movie. The course leaves a lot to be desired too; when the movie veers into horror territory, with frequent off-screen kills and sometimes incoherent motion, it affords little of the authentic’s gripping pressure.
None of it actually is sensible – each the plot when you consider it (a few scenes really feel like energetic plot holes in mild of the killer’s id) and the sheer truth this movie bought made. The unique movie is remembered for being a refreshingly uncomplicated slasher about 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 forged, particularly Gabbriette and Madelyn Cline, properly evoke the authentic forged’s charisma and preternatural beauty. The entire effort is admirable in a surrealist approach – there’s one dream sequence that feels such as you’ve huffed paint – however this stage of fealty to an IP in all probability isn’t wholesome in the lengthy time period.
