I Know What You Did Last Summer review: Low on spine chilling thrills & bloody spills

Film: I know what you did last summer
Cast: Madelyn Cline, Tyriq Withers, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Sarah Pidgeon, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Billy Campbell, Gabbriette Bechtel, Austin Nichols, Joshua Orpin  
Writer/director: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Rating: * *
Runtime: 111 min

The horror formula rears its ugly head in this legacy sequel of the successful franchise. This film is set three decades after the 1997 original. Totally reminiscent of its predecessors, the film uses throwbacks to nostalgia to score with the audience. But how many of the original audience would still be interested in watching this canned nostalgia feature? The younger audience would certainly expect more excesses in a horror movie. That’s not available here.
 
The concept is repeated. A group of good-looking young people in their mid-20s cover up a violent death for which they were responsible. A year later, one of them receives a note containing the ominous titular message. Soon after, a killer armed with a metal hook, clad in a fisherman’s slicker and hat, gets cracking.
 
Danica (Madelyn Cline), her fiancé Teddy (Tyriq Withers), Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), who returns to celebrate their engagement, Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), who was once romantically involved with Ava, and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon,) their estranged friend, are the five friends terrorised by the serial killer. Their ill-fated drive to watch fireworks from Reaper’s Curve becomes the reason. 
 
The police are not helpful, and the chief real estate developer (Billy Campbell) has his own vested interest to secure. So the onus is on past survivors to help. 
 
If you are wondering about the actors who starred in the original guilty pleasure, don’t fret. Some of them are still around to lend connectivity to the original. Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. reprise their roles as Julie and Jack from the 1997 film, and Sarah Michelle Gellar has a cameo. Some of the new actors have a strong social media following, so it's quite obvious why they are there in the film.
 
It’s the same killer type from the 1997 version and its sequel, and the murders aren’t particularly scary or extreme in gore. And lets not forget… the hook is as rusty as the retreaded story here.
 
Writer/director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and co-writer Sam Lansky don’t have anything original to present here. The plot gets increasingly preposterous with serial killing playing out like a macabre game of chess. The kills are rather unimaginative and the acting totally over-the-top.  There’s not much logic in what happens. The narrative is replete with lazy expositional dumps and is thoroughly witless. The dialogue sounds stilted. It feels like a rushed cut-and-paste job altogether. The characters are not well-drawn. They appear clichéd, and it is hard to root for their survival. The unsteady pacing and choppy editing add to your misery. The jump scares don’t affect you, and the silly humour plays out unfunny. The fright sequences appear mechanical. The gore feels outmoded, and the background score is far too invasive to build conviction. There are no surprises here. There’s nothing stylish or unique about this legacy issue. A psycho killer killing pretty young things for the sake of revenge is old hat…won’t you say?