Plot: One year after the fatal car accident that haunted their graduation night, a group of teenagers find themselves bound together by a dark secret and stalked by a brutal killer. As they try to piece together who’s after them, they reveal the dark side of their seemingly perfect town—and themselves. Everyone is hiding something, and uncovering the wrong secret could be deadly.
Review: After the success of 1996’s Scream, Kevin Williamson’s screenplay for I Know What You Did Last Summer was fast-tracked into production. Based on the young adult novel by Lois Duncan, the film starred Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr, Ryan Phillipe, and Sarah Michelle Gellar as teens involved in a hit-and-run accident. A year after covering up the crime, a killer begins taunting the foursome before hunting them down. Where Scream served as a satire of horror tropes, I Know What You Did Last Summer was a traditional slasher. Despite being a box office hit, the film was disliked by Lois Duncan who didn’t appreciate her novel becoming a slasher. After a mediocre feature sequel and a direct-to-DVD follow-up, I Know What You Did Last Summer is back with a full reboot that reinvents the tale for the post-Millennial generation. The result is a much more engaging thriller with some tricks and twists.
Shifting the story from North Carolina to the fictional Hawaiian town of Wai Huna, this new I Know What You Did Last Summer follows the same basic plot that finds a group of friends covering up an accidental death. One year later, someone begins taunting them with increasingly violent threats. Over the eight-episode series (the first four episodes were made available for this review), the characters must figure out who knows what they did. Each episode is told in a fairly non-linear fashion with flashbacks interspersed to the fateful night the year before. As we learn more about each of these individuals, we realize there is more to the story than we see in the first hour. Chapter by chapter, the body count increases as do the suspects.
While each episode features at least one to two fatalities, this series does not feel like a traditional slasher. Instead, this series follows the formula of shows like Pretty Little Liars and Gossip Girl albeit with a much more adult tone. Yes, these characters are mostly between eighteen and nineteen, but the cast actually looks their age for a change. Madison Iseman (Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, Goosebumps 2) plays the dual lead roles of identical twins Lennon and Allison, but she is not a Jennifer Love Hewitt surrogate. Playing two very different sisters, Iseman is relatable as both the shy, introvert as well as the popular mean girl. The supporting cast, including Brianne Tju as Margo, Ezekiel Moore, Ashley Moore, and Sebastian Amoruso are all convincing post-Millennials. At first, the series had me rolling my eyes at all of the social media elements at play, but the reliance on technology is offset by the remote Hawaiian setting which offers a fresh look for the genre.
The series is also pretty graphic compared to similar franchises. There is an abundance of nudity in the episodes, both male and female, as well as sex scenes that were absent from the feature films. It is never gratuitous but definitely takes this away from the PG-13 crowd. The violence, while sporadic, is equally explicit with some solid make-up effects. Surprisingly, there are more kills that are off-screen than on, but when they show them, the filmmakers do not hold anything back. With there being limited kills in the episodes I watched, the filmmakers make sure that they are brutal and stick with you. I also liked that the identity of the killer is toyed with through each episode and while I had a couple of theories as to who it was, by the fourth episode I was still completely in the dark as to who actually was behind the title threat.
Created by newcomer Sara Goodman and directed by veterans Logan Kibens (Snowfall, The L Word), Benjamin Semanoff (Ozark, Stranger Things), and Craig William Macneill (Them, Channel Zero), I Know What You Did Last Summer takes advantage of on-location production in Hawaii. The day scenes are all lush and green while the night shots are brooding but never make it hard to see what is going on. The bloody violence is in your face and looks pretty damn realistic. My biggest complaint with this series is the length. Eight episodes is a good amount of time to misdirect the audience and in the episodes I saw, I was fully invested in figuring out what was going on. But, with their friends and neighbors meeting grisly fates, these characters spend a lot of time going about their daily lives. Some moments feel truly disingenuous and the reliance on contemporary slang sometimes comes across as forced (does anyone really use the phrase “high key” as the opposite of “low key”?).
While I Still Know What You Did Last Summer did shift the story to a tropical locale, this series takes a much more organic approach to the island setting. Not quite the slasher I was expecting it to be, I Know What You Did Last Summer works much like Lois Duncan’s original novel but does so with a modern, 21st-century story. I think that if the second half of the season is anything like the first, this will surely be a solid mystery to try and solve with your friends before each weekly episode debuts. Don’t let the October premiere date fool you though, this is definitely not a horror or slasher series but more of a sexy, psychological thriller. If you can get past some of the leaden dialogue, you will find this is a pretty well-acted whodunit with just the right amount of gore.
I Know What You Did Last Summer premieres on October 15th with four episodes on Prime Video.
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