Jennifer Love Hewitt returns for I Know What You Did Last Summer 'requel'

Australia Broadcast Center

2 days ago

With most of horror's A-listers having been subjected to the reboot-sequel treatment (or 'requel', if we're adopting the lexicon of 2022's Scream) — from Halloween to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to The Exorcist — Hollywood is silently creeping towards the bottom of the barrel.
Fast Facts about I Know What You Did Last Summer
What: A group of twenty-somethings are hunted by a hook-wielding killer a year after covering up an accidental death.
Starring: Chase Sui Wonders, Madelyn Cline, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr
Directed by: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
When: In cinemas now
Likely to make you feel: Like we didn't actually need to know
The original I Know What You Did Last Summer, whose cast boasts a fresh-faced Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr, offers more in the way of 90s nostalgia than blood-curdling thrills — though as someone who was born the year it came out, it's possible I lack the requisite affinity for Dawson's Creek dialogue and Korn needle-drops to evaluate it on its own terms.
Yet the flimsiness of its well-loved source material is itself a genuine reason for this 2025 refresh to exist. This could have been the first transparent cash-grab requel with the potential to exceed what came before, especially considering that the original film can be retroactively viewed through the lens of cancel culture and its paranoid moral reckonings.
Just like their raincoat-clad villains, these movies share a killer hook. A group of pretty, well-bred friends accidentally kill a stranger on a winding coastal road and seemingly cover their tracks, only to be tormented, shamed and picked off by a vengeful killer during Fourth of July celebrations a year later.
This new batch of victims have been aged up from the college kids of the original. The charge of manslaughter gives them more to lose, none more so than Teddy (Tyriq Withers), the son of the town's influential property magnate, and his solipsistic fiancée Danica (Madelyn Cline, Outer Banks). For Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon, The Wilds), the event threatens to derail a hard-won rehabilitation from her troubled past.
When it comes to Chase Sui Wonders' (The Studio) Ava, it's hard to see why such an ill-defined character agrees to keep their secret — a glaring problem, considering she's the film's protagonist.
At least she's not the only final girl in town. Jennifer Love Hewitt reprises her role as Julie James, who took us through the first two fisherman killing sprees, and is re-introduced while lecturing on CPTSD at a nearby college. Meanwhile, her co-survivor and ex-husband Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr) runs the bar where Stevie works.
I Know What You Did Last Summer meekly shies away from its genre's carnal pleasures, unfolding more like a trashy whodunnit than a grand Guignol slasher.
The villain's iconic hook is deployed without flair, dispassionately slicing through skin and latching onto bone in quick cutaways. A late eye-gouging happens entirely off screen.
Jim Gillespie's original film was hardly a gore-fest either, having turned away from the excesses of the 80s slasher, but at least dressed itself in vibrant colours and memorable imagery, like crabs scuttling along a corpse or a hide-and-seek sequence that flared up with fireworks.
Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge) however, demonstrates a loose grasp on tension, tearing each murder to ribbons through shaky edits and tight handheld compositions.
The film's sanitised sensibility also extends to its characters. Robinson and co-writer Sam Lansky lose sight of the fact that, fundamentally, these are not likeable people.
Perhaps these kids don't deserve a hook to the skull, but it's not like we're primed to root for them either; when we return to them a year later, we discover the only ramification of their moral transgression is some mild alcoholism at worst.
At the same time, these rich-kid archetypes are all sanded down to meet some basic standard of likeability — they're all too nice for the audience to have any fun watching them get their comeuppance.
The millennial-written dialogue of its Gen Z cast (who still leave voicemails like it's 1997) toes the line between arch and irritating, occasionally approaching the orbit of Jennifer's Body with groaners like "gentrifi-slay-tion", or the sight of a character begging for his life by offering the contents of his crypto wallet.
The casting of model and Charli XCX collaborator Gabbriette as a true-crime podcaster (her series being named Live, Love, Slaughter), meanwhile, reads as blatant Zoomer baiting.
The joy of disposable horror sequels is in seeing how far an original idea can be stretched on a frugal budget; the spectacular misfires that can arise — like the Y2K sci-fi romp Jason X, or the gloriously gimmicky Saw 3D — are all part of the fun.
No-one was exactly demanding to see Leatherface commit an Instagram Live slaughter under sleek LED strips, but part of me was glad to see one of horror's pre-eminent cross-dressers let out of the closet once more.
What kills I Know What You Did Last Summer is its lack of commitment to anything other than the original film, falling short as either horror, morality play, or irony-poisoned comedy.