I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

In the 2025 soft reboot/sequel to 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, five friends accidentally cause a fatal car accident and cover it up, swearing to keep it a secret. A year later, they are stalked by a hook-wielding killer who sends them taunting messages about their crime.

I Know What You Did Last Summer Review (2025)

In a 20-year cinematic slump bloated with derivative knock-offs and cheap nostalgia bait, 2025’s soft reboot of a long-ago worn-out film franchise is almost impressive in its staleness.

                   

Middling performances and a trite and banal script mark one of the summer’s most remedial offerings. If you’re impressed by tales that defy all logic, rely on characters behaving contrary to all of human existence as they react to cheap and telegraphed jump scare after physics-defying cheap and telegraphed jump scare, and the most unimaginative and goreless deaths in a film of a franchise that has nothing to offer but gore and over the top murder, then 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer is the movie for you.

WOKE REPORT

Random Acts of Wokeness

• The lead actress has a completely random and aggressive lesbian sexual encounter that has nothing to do with her character arc or the narrative in any way. Moments before, she was making googly eyes at a boy she had a history with and spent much of the rest of the film doing the same.
• The camera just so happens to repeatedly focus on a cartoon gay couple during a town hall meeting.
  • One of the men eventually speaks up during the meeting, concerned about the safety of his children. Neither these men nor their children are seen in the film before or after. Box checked.

Constitutional Carry

• The film is set in the real town of Southbend, South Carolina. In the real world, South Carolina is one of 29 states in the union that recognize a citizen’s constitutional right to carry concealed firearms. However, only the corrupt police and those with murderous intent possess firearms in this film. If you watch it, you’ll understand how egregiously stupid it is that not one person in the group or tangential to the group thought about arming themselves or hiring armed professionals to protect those being targeted for brutal murders.

Major Spoiler

• This one genuinely spoils the entire film, and even though it’s certainly an annoying woke element, you should absolutely avoid reading this if you plan on watching the movie at all. I cannot stress this strongly enough
  Spoiler

  Both Freddy Prince Jr and Jennifer Love-Hewitt reprise their roles from the original in this, and while both characters are messed up from their experience almost 30 years ago, Love-Hewitt has fared much better. Prince is a broken man. So much so that….***SERIOUSLY DON’T READ IF YOU ARE GOING TO SEE IT*** he is this film’s killer. It’s not a bad twist, even if it’s not handled all that well, but it’s just that here’s another male legacy character from a franchise who is a ruined man.

Yes, I’m Glad Adams and Jefferson are Dead, and I Hope They Burn In Hell

• The film closes with two of the remaining characters saying, “F### the Fourth of July.” Notably, both the original and this film take place on and around Independence Day. My gut says that, even though there is a deep-seated hatred of America threaded throughout Hollywood, this line isn’t meant to be unpatriotic. Thus, I didn’t take any points off for it.

Defrocked

• Spoiler

  There’s a pastor whose character is only a pastor so that the movie can show a crooked pastor.

Feminine Side

• The last line of the movie before the mid-credit scene consists of a couple of women who claim (and it is absolutely the viewpoint of the film, its writer(s), and its director) that “All of this (the contents of the movie) could have been avoided if men went to therapy.” That’s right, male toxicity is the problem.

Ruin The Movie Spoiler

• This is right up there with the last major spoiler. Do not read this if you plan to watch the movie.
  Spoiler

  Of the core cast, only the men die, and each one dies brutally. In fact, only one female gets killed in the entire film, and, unlike the graphic brutality we see visited upon the male victims, her death takes place off-screen.