Let it never be said that a deeply awkward title might spell doom for a movie. Almost 20 years ago, way back in the ’90s, a gaggle of young stars—including Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Party of Five star Jennifer Love Hewitt—starred in an adaptation of the Lois Duncan novel I Know What You Did Last Summer. Not all of their characters survived the film, in which a group of friends is menaced by a fishhook-wielding slasher who knows their darkest secret. It was part of writer Kevin Williamson’s teen pop culture boom; Williamson also created Dawson’s Creek and wrote Scream.
The movie was a hit and led to two somewhat less smashing sequels and a TV series. Now, its time has come again, and in the great tradition of just naming a new Scream film Scream, we have another movie called simply I Know What You Did Last Summer. Despite seeming to have a plot just like the first film, it is not a straight reboot, because Hewitt and her first-film co-star Freddie Prinze Jr. show up here to be useful once a new set of youths start getting murdered.
Said youths include Madelyn Cline (Outer Banks), Jonah Hauer-King (The Little Mermaid), Tyriq Withers (the upcoming Him), Chase Sui Wonders (The Studio), and Sarah Pidgeon (The Wilds). Some of them are not likely to last very long, one suspects. The synopsis says:
When five friends inadvertently cause a deadly car accident, they cover up their involvement and make a pact to keep it a secret rather than face the consequences. A year later, their past comes back to haunt them and they’re forced to confront a horrifying truth: someone knows what they did last summer…and is hell-bent on revenge. As one by one the friends are stalked by a killer, they discover this has happened before, and they turn to two survivors of the legendary Southport Massacre of 1997 for help.
Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge) directs from a screenplay she wrote with Sam Lansky; Robinson and Leah McKendrick have story credit. I Know What You Did Last Summer is in theaters July 18th.