I Know What You Did Last Summer Review: Amazon’s Slick Horror Remake Feels Empty

Though Amazon’s slick new reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer may share a name with the 1997 film that starred Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar, that’s about where the similarities end.

So if you’re hoping for a nod to the classic scene where Hewitt screams out her frustration while twirling around in a tree-ined street or the one with Gellar dramatically smashing a mirror, you certainly won’t find anything comparable here.

What you will get? Lots of drugs, sex, and nudity, often with an Instagram filter thrown on top. This I Know What You Did Last Summer owes more to HBO’s Euphoria than Lois Duncan’s 1973 novel or the teen slasher classic that Gen-Xers and elder millennials grew up with.

And, like many recent projects about teenage life in the modern era, there are plenty of existential questions about how social media has made us all inherently unknowable, as we posture and pose and put our fakest selves on display for public consumption.

If everything about you is already a lie, what’s what more — even if it is a whopper like covering up a murder? Can you ever know anyone, even those you call your closest friends?

Which, to be clear, is not necessarily a bad thing, per se. But I Know What You Did Last Summer’s main group of teens is nigh on insufferable, with little evidence that any of them — despite the whole committing murder together thing — are on the road to any sort of self-awareness or growth. 

At least the 1997 movie was fun. Amazon’s update…just isn’t. In fact, despite some genuinely surprising twists, most of it is just a straight-up slog.

Yes, the series follows the story of a group of hard-partying teens who accidentally commit a murder on a dark road the night after graduation. Their attempt to cover up the crime backfires when, a year later, they receive ominous threats — including a severed goat head and a message written in its blood — from someone who clearly knows exactly what they did,

As they start dying one by one, the group will have to figure out who’s out for revenge — is it one of them? A stranger? Or is their victim not quite dead after all?

The setting shifts to Hawaii, allowing for the inclusion of beautiful vistas and more scantily clad bodies, but also for an occasional intriguing hint at the class issues that naturally pervade a place where people of such disparate income levels both live and visit. (I wish the show would do more with this!)

But the one truly intriguing addition to this version of I Know What You Did Last Summer is that the story is now centered on a pair of twin sisters — Lennon and Allison — and their complicated, occasionally toxic relationshp. Their mother committed suicide when the were both children and neither has particularly processed her death in the healthiest of ways.

Though Lennon has seemingly moved on, she acts out in the ways familiar to all popular girls in teen dramas — drugs, promiscuity, being cruel to people just because she can. (That she has an Only Fans account is a…let’s just call it a more modern twist on that trope.)

Allison, for her part, is dour and depressed. She has few friends and has never managed to act on her years-long crush on local boy Dylan, whose entire personality seems to hinge on the fact that he’s attractive and less of a jerk than the rest of the boys in their town. (What a winner, right?)

Their crew is rounded out by shallow, social media obsessed Margot — at one point she literally does an Instagram Live from a funeral –along with troublemaker and part time drug dealer Riley, and Johnny, a nice guy who gets tokenized in multiple uncomfortable ways.

None of the secondary characters get much in the way of depth or interiority, and it’s certainly not enough to make us really care one way or another who, if anyone, will be the mysterious killer’s next victim. 

To be fair, there are certainly some compelling moments in the four episodes screened for critics, including several grisly deaths and a few genuine surprises that I won’t spoil here. (The twist that drives one of the series’ central mysteries is either genius or completely insane, and I doubt we’ll find out which before the final credits roll.) 

Madison Iseman is clearly having a blast as Lennon and Allison, doing her best to give each of the twins – who have very different personalities — distinctive mannerisms and facial expressions. Truly, she’s great.

Her costars don’t get the same level of material and are often left with little to do beyond make smug and condescending faces at one another. (And occasionally drop words like “sus” into casual conversation so viewers understand that this is a show about the Youths.)

On the whole, I Know What You Did Last Summer is a horror series that seems more interested in teen angst than a specific body count. Sure, there are multiple big murders and several creatively arranged dead bodies in these first four episodes, but most of the big kills horror fans delight in technically take place offscreen. 

Instead, we get a half dozen extended flashbacks of the massive party that preceeds the accidental murder, which — as you can probably guess —  features copious use of a wide variety of drugs and ill-advised hook-ups between and among our core cast. Everyone appears miserable, despite the fact that the house comes equipped with a blacklit dancefloor and the apparent parental-blessed freedom to do whatever you want.  

Where’s the fun here? The camp? The understanding that this is not a story that needs to take itself quite this seriously? Shrug emoji. 

In the end, it feels as though I Know What You Did Last Summer might actually be improved by the presence of a menacing, rain slicker-wearing psychopath with a hook for a hand. At least it would perk things up.

Stray Thoughts and Observations:

• As much as I love a good creepy dark alley jump scare (or dark cliffside as the case may be), entirely too much of I Know What You Did Last Summer is so poorly lit it actually makes it difficult to tell what’s going on. Please know that I will be much more frightened by something if I can see it
• Another major negative here is  I Know What You Did Last decision to include the town adults in this story. No one is really interested in the sexcapades of a certain dad and the local police chief, the weird hippie mom with vaguely cultish connections, or how one parent uses their own daughter as their drug dealer. No thank you! 

What did you think of this episode of I Know What You Did Last Summer? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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The first four episodes of I Know What You Did Last Summer premiere on Amazon Prime on Friday, October 15, with new episodes to follow weekly. 

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