With the hugely successful slasher series Scream already resurrected as a recent TV show and an upcoming fifth movie, it was inevitable that some of the films that Scream inspired would also get the reboot treatment. Jim Gillespie's I Know What You Did Last Summer was one of 1997's biggest horror movies--with a script by Scream writer Kevin Williamson and a cast of rising young stars, it overcame mixed reviews to make $125 million at the box office and generate two sequels.
Amazon's new version of I Know What You Did Last Summer is an eight-episode series that takes inspiration from both the movie and the 1973 novel that it was based on. The basic set-up is the same--a group of teenagers living in a coastal town (in Hawaii in this case) who are about to depart for college accidentally kill someone while driving at night. They agree to dump the body in the sea and never speak of the incident again. One year later, the group reconvene at home, where an anonymous message informs them that someone knows exactly what terrible thing they did the previous summer, followed by a bloody murder spree.
Each version of this story has varied who the victim is. In Lois Duncan's original novel, it was a child, while in Gillespie's film it was a local man. In this case, the victim has a far more personal connection to the group. Episode 1 ends with a revelation about the victim's true identity--which we won't give away--with the following episodes exploring both the impact on their relationships as well as their attempts to avoid being killed by whoever is picking off the town's residents.
I Know What You Did Last Summer is a show that attempts to embrace both the cultural and technological interests of teenagers in the 21st century as well as utilizing the long-form storytelling of modern TV. Gone is the tight, tense narrative of the movie; instead, showrunner Sara Goodman spreads the story across many hours, with what feels like an ever-increasing number of subplots, characters, and often ridiculous story twists. We get to know not only the main kids, but their parents, neighbors, and the cops investigating the case. There's also an odd subplot about a hippy cult that lives in the town, plus regular flashbacks to the events that led to the accident a year earlier, shown from the point-of-view of different characters. In short, there's a lot going on.
Jumanji actor Madison Iseman takes the lead role--in the fact, two lead roles. She plays Allison, a quiet, introspective girl with few friends who has struggled to get over her mother's suicide and the fact that she finds herself constantly pushed to the sidelines by her twin sister Lennon--also played by Iseman. Lennon is everything Allison is not--popular, outgoing, risk-taking, and only interested in her own selfish pleasures. Iseman is great in both roles, ensuring we almost always know which character we're watching.
The supporting cast is solid, but few of the secondary characters are given the depth that Allison and Lennon are. There's Margot (Brianne Tju), who enjoys post-high school life as a minor social media star, Riley (Ashley Moore) a drug dealer from the wrong side of the tracks, and Dylan (Ezekiel Goodman) who mopes around, pining after Allison. All the characters are self-absorbed teenagers, but the four episodes provided for review do little to make them particularly likable. The weird shifts in tone don't help either--one minute the kids are traumatized by their dead friends and the killer out to get them, the next they're trading pop-culture quips and worrying about online subscribers. This extends to the adult characters too, with Fiona Rene's no-nonsense cop teamed up with a bumbling partner seemingly only there for comic relief.
As a fast-moving and often ludicrously-plotted YA melodrama about teenage love lives and sibling rivalries, I Know What You Did Last Summer is watchable and trashily entertaining. But while it delivers plenty of sex, drugs, and bad behavior, it doesn't really work as a horror series. Gone is the iconic hook-handed villain of the movie; the murders are mostly committed off-screen, and despite the ever-present threat of a killer stalking the kids and the adults in their lives, there's no real sense of danger or tension.
There's too much reliance on the most generic of scares--a sinister blacked-out car following Allison, or stretches of quiet broken by a character jumping at a sudden noise. On the plus side, there are some nicely gruesome moments, including a juicy decapitation and an inventive death by slush machine. The mystery of the killer's identity is also a reasonably compelling one, but given the twists contained in these first four episodes, there's a good chance the final reveal might also be very silly indeed.
The first four episodes of I Know What You Did Last Summer will be available on Amazon Prime Video from October 15, with new episodes dropping weekly after that.
