There’s a moment in the trailer for the reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer where the camera is pulled in close to an adult Jennifer Love Hewitt, and she calmly says, “What are you waiting for?” That tells you everything this movie is about.
If you’re the type to make drinking games for horror movies, the rule for this one would be to take a shot every time someone mentions 1997 or the events of the original movie, and to take two shots when the reference is self-aware that they’re rebooting an older movie, like “this isn’t 1997 anymore” or “they’re trying to pretend like 1997 ever happened.” I wouldn’t recommend anyone actually play that game, but I also don’t even know if that’s something that people do anymore. Watching this made me feel extremely old and out of touch.
I’m instantly suspicious of anyone who claims they loved the original, since even at the time, it was “fine, I guess.” It was 1000% made to take advantage of the post-Scream renewed interest in slasher movies, less overtly self-aware but still incapable of escaping the feeling of “see, we can do that too!” Since one of the leads of this one was in Bodies Bodies Bodies, it felt to me like a reaction to both the recent Scream reboots and an attempt to respond to that movie as well.
And for the first 2/3 or so, it chugs along just fine. It seems to be perfectly aware of what it is and what it wants to do, and it’s just clever enough — easily more clever than the original — to redeem itself. There’s this undercurrent of weird, dark humor that kept me engaged and even had me starting to wonder if I might be genuinely getting into it.
I mention Bodies Bodies Bodies not because this movie has the same satirical edge, but more because I didn’t really understand all of it, and it made me feel very old. If Freddie Prinze Jr, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Billy Campbell hadn’t been there to reassure me that Gen X-ers were welcome here, I would’ve wondered whether I was completely misinterpreting much of it.
That young woman seems to be casually bisexual; is that going to be significant, or is it just a completely unremarkable thing now? That other young woman just saw the aftermath of a brutal murder, and now she’s complaining about her alopecia; is that supposed to be darkly comic, or satirical, or is that just the way The Youth Are These Days? The instigating event is a good bit more morally ambiguous than in the original — is that a plot point? Am I supposed to think this young man is being a prude, or is the movie casting suspicion on the protagonist? Where am I? Is it time for them to bring me my pills?
Especially in the first half, so much of it seemed to be queer-coded that I felt like it’d struck an interesting tone: excessively using all the tropes of slasher movies, with lots of jump scores and overwrought suspenseful music, but balancing it with black humor or just a weird moment for its own sake. Feeling not quite like camp, but filmmakers whose natural inclination was towards camp and self-referential humor, sitting at a table trying hard to restrain themselves, sneaking in just enough to make themselves giggle before getting back to making a slasher movie.
For instance: There’s a town hall meeting where the unnamed resident in the crowd yelling at the police chief is clearly meant to be a gay man there with his partner, but it’s just a thing that happens instead of feeling significant. Freddie Prinze only mentions Scooby-Doo once, which in the context of everything else, feels like almost super-human restraint. And a true-crime podcaster, recording an outro about the city trying to remodel itself as a resort after the murders in 1997, calls it “gentrifislaytion.” Which all by itself was enough to keep me from hating it.
There’s a long history, especially in horror movies, of the filmmakers throwing in queer-coded stuff to wink at the audience, to say, “Yeah, we get you.” But as I Know What You Did Last Summer goes on, hitting you with one fan service moment after another, the unexpectedly-gay stuff felt less like knowingly subversive moments and more like the movie setting traps for the gays in the crowd. (Huntypots?)
For much of its runtime, it was coasting along as a confident reboot, and actually a pretty good whodunnit, making pretty much everyone seem suspicious enough, including the protagonist, that practically anybody could be the killer. But by the end, all of the self-awareness and dark humor started to collapse in on itself, feeling less playfully subversive and more like a movie that desperately wanted to be liked.
I definitely didn’t hate I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I definitely like it better than either of the other movies in the franchise that I’ve seen. (I’ve only seen the first two; I’ve heard that the subsequent movies are irredeemably bad, and I believe it). But I honestly don’t know what to make of it overall. My main takeaway is that I’m a few years older than the returning stars of this reboot, and they’re desperately hanging on to relevance, while I’ve been left behind.
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