Synopsis: A group of friends are terrorized by a stalker who knows about a gruesome incident from their past. Realizing that the stalker is imitating a legendary serial killer, they seek help from the two survivors of the Southport massacre of 1997.
Stars: Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers, Sarah Pidgeon, Billy Campbell, Gabbriette Bechtel, Austin Nichols, Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt
Director: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Rated: R
Running Length: 111 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s appalling attempt to resurrect the Fisherman proves that some legends should stay buried far beneath the waves. It’s a confused mess that tries to raise the dead without understanding what made it alive in the first place.
The Saddest Catch of the Day
If there were an honorary award for the most unearned sequel of the year, I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) would win it by a landslide—hook, line, and stinker. The film presents itself as the long-awaited legacy follow-up to 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, yet this fourth installment drags its weary body into theaters with all the grace of a dying fish on deck gasping for air. It exists in that gray space somewhere between reboot and remake, attempting to honor the legacy of a teen slasher classic while simultaneously gouging out its memory with a rubberized hook.
The Hook That Started It All
Twenty-eight years ago, a fisherman with a hook terrorized Julie James and her friends. Their guilty secret became a blood-soaked reckoning that helped define late-’90s teen horror. Kevin Williamson‘s razor-sharp script for I Know What You Did Last Summer, written before Scream even existed, was loosely adapted from Lois Duncan‘s creepy 1973 novel. Williamson’s screenplay understood that the best slashers aren’t just about creative kills. They’re about consequences catching up with characters who thought they could outrun their sins.
Riding the first post-Scream wave of teen horror, the 1997 original was a sleek, high-concept screamfest. It arrived armed with a simple but surprisingly durable premise: four friends hit a pedestrian and cover it up, only to be haunted a year later by a hook-wielding killer in a slicker. It was glossy, tense, and made a cultural impact, cementing its central foursome as horror royalty.
The sequels were diminishing returns. In theaters barely a year later, I Still Know… was campy but passable. Nine years later, 2006’s I’ll Always Know… was unrelated to the previous two and was released straight to video purgatory. It’s best not to mention the 2021 Amazon Prime reboot attempt at all. And now, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson‘s appalling attempt to resurrect the Fisherman proves that some legends should stay buried far beneath the waves. It’s a confused mess that tries to raise the dead without understanding what made it alive in the first place.
New Blood, No Pulse
This time, the guilty group is five insufferable post-college twenty-somethings who manage to watch someone die as the result of a minor traffic incident. Rather than call a lawyer, give a statement to the cops, or even book time with their therapist, they decide it’s best just to move on and pretend it never happened. Naturally, a year later, someone stalks them. This person knows their secret and who’s been cribbing notes from the original hook-wielding boogeyman.
Though the small fishing village may have scrubbed him from the town records, his legend lives on. Desperate and out of options, they reach out to the two people who somehow survived all this once before: Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr., Christmas with You), now divorced and mostly silent on the matter of the Southport Massacre.
The central incident binding our protagonists is so laughably weak that one honest conversation could resolve it instantly. Yet these spoiled, undisciplined, rude, and spineless young adults give us zero reason to root for their survival. Unlike the original’s fated foursome—Hewitt, Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Ryan Phillippe—who faced genuine consequences for actions with real moral weight, these characters’ “crime” is so pathetically minor in terms of their involvement that their year-long guilt feels manufactured.
Final Girls & Forgettable Guys
The young cast, including Madelyn Cline (Glass Onion), Chase Sui Wonders (Bodies Bodies Bodies), Jonah Hauer-King (The Little Mermaid), Tyriq Withers, and Sarah Pidgeon (The Friend), do their best with a script that feels like someone at a corporate retreat wrote it after watching only the Scream 4 trailer. The script gives Cline and Wonders the bulk of the emotional heavy lifting as besties-turned-estranged survivors Danica and Ava, but their anguish never digs deeper than surface tension. Most of the time, the young women seem more upset over being inconvenienced than that their friends are dying.
Hauer-King’s Milo may be one of the blandest love interests in modern horror; you get the feeling he could vanish entirely without anyone noticing—and he does. Withers brings a smidge of personality to Teddy, the rich kid with nothing to lose, coasting on family privilege. Only Pidgeon manages to bring the barest hint of mystery behind her eyes, suggesting a real character lurking beneath the clichés and paper-thin dialogue. Though she’s more plot fuel than a person you’d care about, Gabbriette Bechtel‘s podcaster Tyler provides brief, chaotic relief from the group’s collective inertia.
When Hewitt and Prinze reappear, it’s a reminder of what this franchise once was. Their easy chemistry and world-weariness revive the film’s sagging momentum. Hewitt, in particular, still confidently embodies the blend of spunk and vulnerability that made her original character so compelling. Yes, she gets to deliver her signature line (twice!), and it sent an unexpected chill up my spine. Sadly, the film relegates them to guest-star status in someone else’s sloppy experiment, delivering one-liners sharp enough to sting and wise advice, briefly lighting up a story that never earned our investment.
Behind the Mask of Mediocrity: Directing in the Dark
Robinson—who co-wrote Thor: Love and Thunder and helmed the zippy Do Revenge for Netflix—has a good eye for satire and stylized teen drama, but here she’s light years out of her depth. The pacing is all over the place, the tension is nonexistent, and the gore is handled with the kind of editorial skittishness that makes you wonder if someone got cold feet in post.
There’s a scene where two characters are trapped on opposite sides of a glass door, flailing against it with the passion of someone trying not to smudge their manicure. Getting slap-happy with a door when your life is on the line rings false. Compare that to other titles in which people put up a fight to stay alive. This lack of effort to survive is emblematic of a film that constantly pulls back right when it should go for the jugular.
Blood, Sweat, and Tears (Mostly Tears): Fear, Fumbled
The script, written by Robinson, Leah McKendrick (Scrambled), and Sam Lansky (rumored ghostwriter for Britney Spears‘s memoir, which explains why this feels like it takes zero ownership over the material), reads like the creative team that churned out “The Babysitters Club” books suddenly decided to tackle jaw-clenching slasher territory. Robinson and her cinematographer demonstrate no grasp of spatial geography, rarely establishing character locations before plunging into scenes that never allow tension the space to develop. Half the time, you’re clueless about whose house people occupy or what time of day it is.
Elisha Christian‘s stale cinematography obsessively positions actors in medium shots at extreme screen edges, abandoning three-quarters of the frame to empty blur. You watch characters drift through negative space as if lost in a fog, and when gore does appear, Saira Haider‘s editing seems determined to avoid showing any weapon-to-skin impact. Aside from a few notable exceptions, Haider bizarrely cuts away at crucial carnage moments that I’d imagine were initially served as audience payoff. There’s at least some thought put into the costume and production design—Mari-An Ceo and the twins Courtney & Hillary Andujar (A Desert) give us a nice coastal-meets-hipster vibe—but those aesthetics can’t mask the script’s shallow stakes.
The Body Count That Didn't Count
The lack of payoff extends to the kills. Characters die with zero fanfare—no build-up, no clever set-up. Just walk-walk-stab-fall. Even when the film finally unmasks the Fisherman, the script forces a monologue so Scooby-Doo/”No One Asked” in tone that the writers scramble to close every plot hole in one emotionally askew speech. Worse yet, the film features at least two instances of victims simply standing motionless while a killer approaches and dispatches them. No fanfare, no struggle, nothing. I suppose they wanted to get out of the film as quickly as we did by that point.
Canon, Cannibalized: Legacy and Franchise Damage
This film commits unforgivable sins against the franchise’s legacy, making decisions about the future of the series and next steps for characters that range from witless to outright insulting. The movie can’t determine if it’s a soft reboot or a backdoor remake. The script lifts specific lines verbatim from the 1997 original alongside entire scenarios. It mimics horror filmmaking as if someone were blindly following a recipe they don’t understand. I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) is so misguided in its approach that I’m not confident many of the people working behind the camera could identify what a horror film is if challenged to do so.
What stings the most is that there was real potential here. It isn’t impossible to revive a legacy horror—the Scream movies, Halloween, even Candyman: these films prove that tapping into nostalgia can fuel fresh thrills. But this? This film feels like a worst-case-scenario drill for a reboot that someone accidentally greenlit. The creative team treats the source material like an old sweater you can stretch without worrying that it will rip.
I Know What You Did to This Franchise
After 100 minutes of this awesomely foolish energy waste, the most clever and entertaining element proves to be the 60-second mid-credit sequence, which I wouldn’t dare spoil. This golden sliver of wit and invention suggests someone, somewhere, had a good idea once. It’s a cruel reminder of how good this could have been with just a fraction more effort and imagination.
If you love recycled scares and a cast trying their best on autopilot, you might find a guilty-pleasure groove. Bafflingly tone-deaf and devoid of anything resembling suspense or stakes, I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) is a monumental misfire the studio should have quietly buried at sea. Instead, it’s bobbing on the surface, begging us to pretend it’s scary. It’s not.
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