‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ review: A funny stab at the lousy original

Horror movie characters never learn from past mistakes.

Running away from the killer, teen girls will always, always sprint up the stairs and into an inescapable bedroom. They know no other path.

But, outside the screen, filmmakers occasionally do make life-saving course corrections.

That’s the most pleasant surprise of the sorta sequel to “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (inasmuch as a reboot about a checklist of college kids getting impaled can be pleasant or surprising): It’s a lot better than the 1997 version, if equally as stupid.

“Nostalgia is overrated,” says Jennifer Love Hewitt’s returning Julie James, taking her own hook to all the zombified millennials and Gen Xers in the audience who unconditionally love the flawed original. 

The awful ‘90s movie was released in the wake of “Scream” blowing up the genre a year earlier. Yet when it arrived, it was just another shrieks-and-shrugs slasher flick and went off a cliff in more ways than one. 

Yes, it had Hewitt, but it had no wit. The Fisherman wasn’t remotely scary. The characters were interchangeable. The whodunit ending featured some guy we hadn’t even met. The enduring image is crabs in a trunk! 

When other critics prattle on about so-called “legacy” sequels, as if “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” is some sort of vaunted Everest to climb, I laugh and laugh and laugh some more.

The improved refresh, which also stars Freddie Prinze Jr. alongside the new young cast, is very funny and dry. The film is self-aware, but not in the obnoxious way the recent “Scream” movies have been. And it’s cognizant of the franchise’s many, many faults.  

When one imperiled character suggests the group just “f–k off to the Bahamas,” Prinze Jr.’s grizzled Ray shoots back, “For reasons I won’t get into, I wouldn’t do that.”

The kills are much more gruesome and the shadowy Fisherman is actually freaky. 

“I Know” kept me interested, even if it also made me braindead. Make no mistake, this is a dumb movie. One woman loses two fiances and is back to wisecracking a scene later. The flick is dependent on obvious jump-scares and retro throwbacks. But it’s also a nice break from all the self-important horror movies out there with Oscar aspirations. The key word here is “summer.”

The waters off the shores of Southport, North Carolina may be rocky, but one thing that’s not rocking the boat is the familiar story.

At the start, we’re practically in “Groundhog Day,” only it’s the Fourth of July. A group of five well-heeled, well-lubricated friends drive up to a cliffside road to watch the fireworks. 

Rather than a hit-and-run, however, this time another car swerves off the road after almost slamming into Teddy (Tyriq Withers), a drunk dummy standing in the middle of the street. The driver plummets to their likely death.

Teddy rings his powerful dad to fix the mess, Murdaugh murders style, and the group agrees to never speak of the incident again. 

One year later, at her engagement party, airhead Danica (Madelyn Cline) gets an ominous letter among her presents: “I know what you did last summer.”

Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s film then hitches onto the latest fad — the original scream queen, hardened and battle ready, goes once more unto the breach. Think Jamie Lee Curtis in the “Halloween” reboot or Neve Campbell in the 2022 “Scream.” Julie, now a traumatized psychology professor, reluctantly gets roped in.

Her young prototype is Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), an untethered free spirit with issues. She flirts with innocent Milo (Jonah Hauer-King) and is trailed by the suspicious Tyler (Gabbriette Bechtel), the host of the murder podcast “Live, Laugh, Slaughter.” 

Most enticing is Stevie, a townie who works at the local bar, played by fresh-from-Broadway Sarah Pidgeon. Come to think of it, Pidgeon is the human embodiment of the 1990s.

Somebody brutally dies, and then the self-absorbed, unlikable, helpless survivors have no solution but to throw a bath bomb in the tub and hook up. You see? Mocking Gen Z is the great American pastime.

After a completely ridiculous ending — still leagues better than the first movie’s — a post-credits sequence suggests that a sequel could be in the cards. But, honestly, by now the stationary stores are out of paper. The Sharpies runneth dry. Find me someone who doesn’t know what they did last summer.  

We all remember how well a followup worked for this series the last two times.

I say: One and done, then give ‘em the hook.