I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer

Aggressively dull and downright unwatchable, I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer forces the viewer to regard its predecessors in an entirely new light – as the film’s relentless incompetence ensures that I Know What You Did Last Summer and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer can’t help but come off as Hitchcockian masterpieces by comparison. The film, which is essentially a remake of the 1997 original, follows a group of friends (including Brooke Nevin’s Amber and Torrey DeVitto’s Zoe) as they inadvertently contribute to the death of one of their own after a prank goes horribly wrong, with the remainder of the proceedings picking up a year later and detailing the gangs’ efforts at dodging an increasingly persistent maniac clad in the series’ iconic fisherman’s outfit. Director Sylvain White, working from a script by Michael D. Weiss, has infused I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer with hopelessly low-rent visuals that play an instrumental role in cultivating an atmosphere of worthlessness, as the filmmaker’s all-too-frequent reliance on ostentatious editorial tricks effectively eliminates any trace of suspense from the movie’s scarce kill sequences. The woefully deliberate pace with which the story unfolds (ie the first death doesn’t come until around the halfway mark) is exacerbated by the uniformly bland performances, with the film’s various actors essentially forced to portray carbon copies of the original’s characters (ie much like Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Julie, Nevin’s Amber is initially reluctant to keep the secret). Add to that an eye-rollingly silly supernatural explanation for the killer’s motivations and you’ve got a recipe for a bottom-of-the-barrel exercise in needlessness, and one can only hope that the film marks the end of the deranged, slicker-wearing fisherman’s cinematic exploits.

1/2* out of ****