I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (2025)
A group of friends are terrorised by a stalker who knows about a gruesome incident from their past.
Spare a thought for poor Lois Duncan. The I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise began not with Kevin Williamson’s screenplay for Jim Gillespie’s 1997 film, but her namesake 1973 YA suspense novel on which it was based.
Like much of the late author’s work, I Know What You Did Last Summer was sensitive and thoughtful, dealing seriously with themes like guilt, responsibility, trauma, violence, and death. The story was that a group of teens accidentally ran down a boy on a bicycle and, swearing each other to secrecy, were stalked a year later by someone seeking violent retribution. Duncan herself knew of the trauma attendant on murder; in 1989, her 18-year-old daughter was killed in a crime that went unsolved until 2021, sadly five years after Duncan had passed away. She’d written a book about the cold case and established a foundation for investigating unsolved crimes.
With all this in mind, one can see why she wasn’t best pleased when she visited the ’90s set of Last Summer and saw that Williamson had turned her novel into a trashy teen slasher. The boy on the bike was replaced with a fisherman, whose hook and rain slicker were intended to create a new horror franchise icon à la Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, etc. Her reaction was reportedly so negative that she was barred from further set visits. (To quote a 2002 interview with Absolute Write, Duncan said of the production, “I was appalled when my book… was made into a slasher film. As the mother of a murdered child, I don’t find violent death something to squeal and giggle about.”)
Williamson would still go on, however, to translate another of Duncan’s dark and serious novels, Killing Mr Griffin (1978), into the teen thriller Teaching Mrs Tingle (1999). Although not directly based on Mr Griffin, it used the same basic premise of students kidnapping their teacher. It was also a box office bomb that had to be watered down significantly due to controversy around violence in film at that time, due to the Columbine High School massacre.
The ’97 Last Summer and its hilariously titled sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)—shouldn’t that be I Still Know What You Did the Summer Before Last?—play like the type of thing Williamson’s Scream (1996) was satirising. You can imagine Jamie Kennedy’s movie-nerd character watching them while Ghostface sneaks up behind him with a knife, or discussing their crazy plots in the video store. And by the time the more directly parodic Scary Movie (2000) hit cinemas, they’d become of a moment with Scream, the Wayans brothers’ film treating both franchises interchangeably.
The original Last Summer has some retro ‘90s charm and probably still holds up to the degree you can still watch it and be entertained. But its sequel is pure junk, a victim of trying to make a story that should only have been told once into an ongoing franchise. There was also a 2006 direct-to-video sequel, I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, and a 2021 TV series on Prime Video that died a death after a single eight-episode season. I’d be surprised if anyone cares about either.
Cut to almost 20 years later, and we have a same-name reboot that brings back original characters in support roles, the hot new horror reboot that takes an old property and gives it a makeover.
Directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (who co-wrote 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder) and written by her with Sam Lansky (a journalist and author who ghostwrote Britney Spears’ 2023 memoir The Woman in Me), Last Summer ‘25 begins with a group of post-college twenty-somethings at an engagement party.
Ava (Chase Sui Wonders) has returned to the upscale seaside resort of Southport to celebrate her friends Danica (Madelyn Cline) and Teddy’s (Tyriq Withers) impending nuptials. There she meets her love interest, Milo (Jonah Hauer-King) and the fifth member of their high school social circle, Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon).
The gang celebrate their reunion by watching the 4th of July fireworks from Reaper’s Curve, a notoriously dangerous stretch of road. After their antics cause a driver to careen onto the rocks below, Teddy calls his rich father to cover it up and they make a pact to never mention it again, reluctantly on Ava and Stevie’s part. One year later, a letter arrives to let them know that someone saw what happened… yes, last summer. Cue a string of murders as the friends scramble to figure out what’s going on.
I Know What You Did Last Summer 2025 is a middle-of-the-road reboot of a slasher franchise that was never that great. This time the characters are aged up a bit and there are some potentially interesting themes about wealth, privilege, and trauma introduced. However, none of that’s really dealt with beyond the mildest platitudes. It’s trying to do for the Last Summer film franchise what Scream did for its own, which makes some sense since that one was started by the same writer. But Last Summer just doesn’t have Scream’s edge or irony.
There’s some decent gore, although I’m always disappointed when a slasher film is rated 15 as opposed to 18 in the UK; since gruesome killings are the main selling point of this sub-genre, unless the property’s YA (i.e. Clown in a Cornfield), why not go all the way? I do credit slashers that have a murder mystery, though, and this one’s okay. I smiled at the callbacks to the early films too, my favourite being when a character suggests sailing to the Bahamas, a reference to I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.
And there’s even a nod to possibly the franchise’s biggest plot hole, in terms of its premise: the killer wears a rain slicker because “it’s a fishing town”, meaning that it’s meant to be a disguise, even though these films take place in July and so police would pretty quickly spot the one guy in heavy-duty oilcloth collapsing in the street. This ain’t I Know What You Did Last Winter, guy.
In a modernising touch, Ava is made bisexual. The film has a weird attitude to sex, though. I think that it wants to be seen as sex-positive, but it only introduces Ava’s queerness after the car accident and in a scene that suggests that she’s just had rough sex with a woman for a porn shoot.
Later Ava asks a male partner to choke her, which he’s reluctant to do, and the scene’s coded to suggest that she wants this to fulfil a psychological need to be punished for her role in the accident. So her fondness for kink and maybe even her queerness are based on mental damage/subconscious guilt? An unfortunate implication, especially since the only other queer character is presented as an overconfident “bad girl” whose fate mirrors that of “sluts” in old slasher films. Since kink isn’t otherwise a theme here, Robinson and Lansky would have done better to remove the choking element.
Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. return to their original roles, Hewitt intended to fill the Sidney Prescott role played by Neve Campbell in the most recent Scream films, a Final Girl drawn reluctantly back into the fray. Again, that doesn’t quite work here because Last Summer was merely a revenge tale, while Scream takes place in a world where characters know on some level that they’re in a slasher narrative.
Ava going to Hewitt’s Julie James for help is just weird. Why would a woman who was also blackmailed by a killer after she and her friends caused a vehicular death 30 years ago know anything about what’s happening now? That would only work if there was something supernatural going on and Julie had access to mystic lore. She doesn’t, so it doesn’t. On top of this, there’s a bizarre mid-credits scene that brings back a character from the ’98 sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Is there anyone, and this is a genuine question, who cares enough to be excited for this? The movie came out when a lot of Last Summer ‘25’s target audience weren’t even twinkles in their daddies’ eyes.
What would have been innovative is if Last Summer returned to Duncan’s source material. You could modernise it, have it be about teenagers playing with their phones when they cause a deadly accident one night. Their age would give them vulnerability, and emphasise themes around responsibility and consequences, things important to teach teenagers.
And yet… an interesting teen slasher? I’m a dreamer, I know.
USA • AUSTRALIA • CANADA | 2025 | 111 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH
Cast & Crew
director: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson.
writers: Sam Lansky & Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (story by Leah McKendrick & Jennifer Kaytin Robinson; based on characters created by Lois Duncan from her novel).
starring: Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers, Sarah Pidgeon, Billy Campbell, Gabbriette Bechtel, Austin Nichols, Freddie Prinze Jr. & Jennifer Love Hewitt.
