After 30 years, followers can breathe a sigh of aid – Julie James and Ray Bronson are again! Now, “Who are Julie James and Ray Bronson…and what fans?” I hear you ask. These are minor quibbles within the greater image: for some motive they’ve put collectively a legacy sequel to Jim Gillespie’s 1997 slasher underdog, I Know What You Did Last Summer.
It’s troublesome to understand why this model of I Know What You Did Last Summer was made – the bubble for horror legacy sequels has successfully burst after infinite, largely dangerous iterations. Had this been greenlit six months later, it might have probably been a arduous reboot; as a substitute, we get an odd, ungainly hybrid with an id disaster. As within the unique, right here a new group of sizzling younger individuals by accident kill a man in a automobile accident on the Fourth of July and swear one another to secrecy. A yr later, a masked fisherman rocks up on the town wielding a large 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 is a unusual, sporadically entertaining mix of much more concepts than you’d anticipate from, effectively, an I Know What You Did Last Summer 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. Even as 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. This is Avengers: Endgame for a largely unbeloved 90s slasher – there may be fairly actually a mid-credits scene with Jennifer Love Hewitt in Nick Fury drag teeing up a sequel. The audience is me, a couple of my pals, and possibly 40 to 50 different individuals on planet Earth.
Since it makes so little sense to do a slavish legacy sequel for I Know What You Did Last Summer of all properties, it offers Robinson in depth wiggle room to do no matter she needs. Scream, its spoiled cousin, is a roundly beloved franchise and was too vital to screw up or basically meddle with once they introduced it again in 2022. I Know What You Did Last Summer strikes out in much more compelling methods than that Scream sequel – which buckled beneath the burden of its ouroboric meta narrative – ever did.
If I Know What You Did Last Summer 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 large swings and misses a number of of them for purely technical causes. The featherweight script (co-written with Sam Lansky) is simply too unserious to promote the movie’s absurd, intense finale, and the pair have a robust affinity for tin-eared ‘girls rule, boys drool’ feminism, peppering in baffling, completely unironic strains about how the complete movie’s massacre may have been prevented “if men just went to therapy.” 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 provides little of the unique’s gripping stress.
None of it actually is smart – each the plot when you consider it (a few scenes really feel like lively plot holes in mild of the killer’s id) and the sheer reality this movie obtained made. The unique movie is remembered for being a refreshingly uncomplicated slasher in regards to the period’s greatest stars hooking up and getting hooked to dying, so there’s not a lot of a tone or a vibe to duplicate. Yet Robinson, a diehard fan, does her damndest, and the forged, specifically Gabbriette and Madelyn Cline, properly evoke the unique forged’s charisma and preternatural beauty. The complete 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.
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