The scene where the Last Summer Crew "do" the thing that they "did" last summer was unfolding, and they're in the car on the curvy road above the ocean where they're supposed to hit the pedestrian and leave him for dead. "Watch out!!" one character yells, causing another to slam on the brakes. Turns out he was messing with the driver, and there was nothing in the road. Decent fakeout I suppose, though it'd probably create a "cry wolf" scenario when they do have to avoid the pedestrian later on. (Though perhaps that contributes more to their guilt.)
Same character, a bit of a jackass, then gets out of the car so they can watch the fireworks, it being the 4th of July and that being the purpose of the current joyride anyway. In doing this he spends some time flailing about in the middle of the road, not worrying whether he'll be hit by another car, not caring whether he provides a dangerous obstruction on this twisty road. One car blares its horn at him and swerves to miss him, but another comes up more suddenly, doesn't swerve as effectively enough, and crashes through the fence, dangling over the cliff, the drop from which will result in the certain death of the driver. The five friends try to prevent the car from going over but they can't.
"Interesting twist," I thought. "In this remake, they don't hit a pedestrian, they just cause a driver to lose control of his car."
The scene of self-recrimination doesn't ring as truthfully as it does in a hit and run, though. The characters heap the same sort of manslaughter charges on themselves, even though causing an accident through stupidity is not nearly the same thing as running a man down with your car and failing to report it to the police. But they need the guilt to be equivalent, so indeed the characters panic and don't report it to the police, the logic for which I found pretty spurious.
But that wasn't my only realization during this scene. The other was:
"Oh wait, this is not a remake. It is more properly classified as a sequel."
Or as Josh Larsen on Filmspotting calls them, a "reheat."
Using the same title throws you off, but I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) is not a remake of I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) any more than Scream (2022) is a remake of Scream (1996). (Though in both cases, Summer swoops in for the sloppy seconds of an idea Scream had first.)
Of course, one dead giveaway is that Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt are reprising their roles from the original, which you can't do in a remake. (There's even an unexpected cameo from Sarah Michelle Gellar, whose character died in the original movie or one of its sequels.)
So does that make it a problem for watching in a month thematically devoted to horror remakes?
Maybe? Who cares, it's just a blog. I can watch what I want, when I want, and it doesn't matter, and part of the fun of choosing movies to watch for themed viewing series is potentially realizing they don't all fit in perfectly with the theme.
But there's also the spirit of a remake within this movie, considering that it a lot more closely follows the structure of the original than Scream (2022) follows the structure of the original Scream. If they didn't want it to be considered sort of a remake, they likely would have had a different inciting incident, staged in some entirely different location. Instead, the roadside manslaughter is on I believe the same road in the same town, even possibly the same part of the same road in the same town, and deviates from the original only superficially in its details.
There's another thing this movie has in common with the original, vis-a-vis Scream: It's a vastly inferior attempt at a good slasher movie.
Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, whose Do Revenge was not great either, has a certain basic competence that makes this movie reasonably watchable. I found her writing, particularly her dialogue, a bit more problematic than her directing. There's one scene in front of a town council that's a bad example of both.
Overall, though, the movie just kept losing its footing with me the deeper in it got, until I found all the various plot machinations at the end to be a bit absurd. Also: a real lack of great kills, which other 2025 horror has accomplished a lot better (see: The Monkey and Final Destination: Bloodlines).
Another thing I found lacking: the way the movie accumulates an additional body count, and the logic behind why the killer would want to kill those people. Since there were only five friends in the car, and you likely want to kill about eight people in this movie, there have to be some other random townspeople who don't have anything to do with what the Last Summer Crew did last summer, but are targeted anyway. There is no rationale within the logic of the film why the man in the rain slicker would want to kill most of them.
One thing I'll say in its favor, though, was that I am all in on the lead, Chase Sui Wonders. She seemed more familiar to me than from just Bodies Bodies Bodies, like I had just seen her in something the other week. Oh, duh: I just checked her IMDB again and she was in The Studio, which I didn't just see the other week, but saw as recently as about three months ago. Funny, I didn't actually love her character in The Studio, possibly because she's set up as a younger generation adversary to someone in my generation, and I am starting to become an old man susceptible to these generation gaps. But I think I must have unconsciously loved the performer, because I was glad to see her turn up here and I find her screen presence compelling.
As for Hewitt and Prinze, they comport themselves reasonably well, though I was actually a bit more impressed with Prinze than I was with Hewitt. Having found Prinze to be so lacking when I finally recently saw She's All That, I expected to have a softer spot for Hewitt here.
Flawed premise for watching or not, this was a 2025 film so I likely would have prioritized it for my year-end rankings, and might as well watch it in the month when you're already watching other horror movies, right? Unfortunately for the film, it does not figure to fare very well in those rankings.
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