Riding hot on the heels of Wes Craven’s enormous box office hit “Scream”, director Jim Gillespie’s 1997 slasher “I Know What You Did Last Summer” pretty much followed the same path to success. It was made on a small budget, it featured a collection of fresh young faces, and it raked in a lot of money leading to one immediate sequel, one later direct-to-video sequel, a now a legacy sequel that follows the events from the second movie.

Originally based on a 1973 novel by Lois Duncan, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” pulls inspiration from an old urban legend of the Hookman. In the 1997 film, a group of teenage friends from Southport, North Carolina are terrorized by a hook-wielding killer one year after they covered up a car accident where they accidentally killed a man. Murder and mayhem ensued as the friends found themselves the target of a mysterious killer.

The 2025 film (which follows that silly trend of using the same name as a previous installment) takes place 28 years after the Southport murders. Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, working from a script she co-wrote with Sam Lansky, basically follows the same blueprint as the first film, with a new group of friends and a couple of old familiar faces which fans will enjoy seeing despite them feeling shoehorned in.

Five not so interesting friends, Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Danica (Madelyn Cline), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), drive up in the hills overlooking Southport for the best view of the town’s annual late-night Fourth of July fireworks show. As the group dumbly goofs around in the middle of the winding road, a truck is forced to swerve to miss them, plunging off the gorge to the rocks below.

Rather than help, the frightened group flee the scene. They later find out the driver was killed, but Teddy’s wealthy father (Billy Campbell) uses his influence with the cops to keep the kids from being implicated. The five friends take an oath to never mention what happened to anyone. But if you know anything about the original movie you know their secret comes back to haunt them.

One year later, Danica receives a mysterious note the reads “I know what you did last summer“. It forces the five startled friends back together where they quickly find themselves being stalked by a hook-wielding killer in a rain slicker. While the police aren’t much help, they find unexpected allies in Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.) – two original survivors of the 1997 murder spree.

Robinson and Lansky try but have a tough time giving us anyone to root for. It’s no fault of the cast as everyone puts what they can into their mostly hollow characters. Even Hewitt and Prinze Jr. struggle to bring anything beyond nostalgia to their characters. The story does them no favors, predictably moving from point to point, relying on jump scares rather than real tension, and eventually falling apart with a desperate twist that is more eye-rolling than shocking.

That leaves us with the kills – something all good slashers lean on to some degree. Here they barely leave an impression and even the most die-hard slasher fan will have a tough time being impressed. It’s just another blemish on what is a mostly lifeless and painfully by-the-numbers snooze that has a difficult time justifying its own existence. We get glimpses of what the movie could have been, but sadly it’s only glimpses. “I Know What You Did Last Summer” opens in theaters today.