After 30 years, followers can breathe a sigh of reduction – 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 within the larger image: for some cause they’ve put collectively a legacy sequel to Jim Gillespie’s 1997 slasher underdog, I Know What You Did Final Summer season.
It’s troublesome to understand why this model of I Know What You Did Final Summer season was made – the bubble for horror legacy sequels has successfully burst after countless, largely dangerous iterations. Had this been greenlit six months later, it could have possible been a onerous reboot; as a substitute, we get an odd, ungainly hybrid with an identification disaster. As within the authentic, right here a new group of scorching younger individuals by accident kill a man in a automotive accident on the Fourth of July and swear one another to secrecy. A 12 months later, a masked fisherman rocks up on the town wielding a massive hook to precise his revenge… however this time the group can flip to the unique 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 count on from, properly, an I Know What You Did Final Summer season legacy sequel. Director and author Jennifer Kaytin Robinson grapples with wellness tradition, gentrification, institutional misogyny and the life altering results of trauma, all of 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. Whilst somebody who adores the unique movie (to the purpose that one aspect character’s shared surname with the primary movie’s director didn’t go unnoticed) it’s nonetheless mind-boggling that this unusual not-quite-reboot made it to display screen. That is Avengers: Endgame for a principally unbeloved 90s slasher – there’s 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 buddies, and possibly 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 Final Summer season of all properties, it provides Robinson in depth wiggle room to do no matter she needs. Scream, its spoiled cousin, is a roundly beloved franchise and was too essential to screw up or basically meddle with once they introduced it again in 2022. I Know What You Did Final Summer season strikes out in much more compelling methods than that Scream sequel – which buckled below the burden of its ouroboric meta narrative – ever did.
If I Know What You Did Final Summer season has loftier ambitions than the typical slasher, these are fatally cramped by the restrictions of the IP sandbox it’s enjoying in. The movie violently seesaws between paying homage to the unique 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, solely unironic strains about how all the movie’s massacre might have been prevented “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 path leaves a lot to be desired too; when the movie veers into horror territory, with frequent off-screen kills and infrequently incoherent motion, it affords little of the unique’s gripping rigidity.
None of it actually is sensible – each the plot when you concentrate on it (a few scenes really feel like lively plot holes in mild of the killer’s identification) and the sheer truth this movie bought made. The unique movie is remembered for being a refreshingly uncomplicated slasher concerning the period’s largest stars hooking up and getting hooked to dying, so there’s not a lot of a tone or a vibe to copy. But Robinson, a diehard fan, does her damndest, and the solid, particularly Gabbriette and Madelyn Cline, properly evoke the unique solid’s charisma and preternatural beauty. The entire effort is admirable in a surrealist method – there’s one dream sequence that feels such as you’ve huffed paint – however this degree of fealty to an IP in all probability isn’t wholesome within the lengthy time period.