Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ On Prime Video, A Zoomer Twist On The Classic ‘90s Horror Film About A Secrets And Murder

There’s a reason why the 1997 film I Know What You Did Last Summer was such a big hit — besides its bevy of late-’90s pretty TV stars. It’s a unique mystery wrapped in a slasher flick. Someone knows something and keeps killing the other people who were in on that something. So, how would that dynamic play out in a series, almost a quarter-century later? 

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The opening of a cave, water flowing through it. A girl’s screams. Then we pan back to the rocks to see a young woman looking over the water from the cliffs. “I’m sure you’re sitting there right now thinking you know who you are, who your friends are. I thought I knew. I was wrong.”

The Gist: Lennon Grant (Madison Iseman) is driving back to her hometown on Waikiki after a year away in college. She sees a text that says “I C U” and gets freaked out. She’s definitely a changed person from when she graduated high school the year before, in ways that her father Bruce (Bill Heck) doesn’t understand. When she gets to her room, she opens her closet door to see a dripping, bloody head of some sort, with the words “I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER” scrawled on her mirror.

Back to last summer, there’s a hot graduation party, supervised by various parents, going on at an oceanfront mansion. There we see Lennon, dancing, drinking and getting nasal sprayers full of some illicit substance from her friend Riley (Ashley Moore). Her twin sister, the more studious Allison (Iseman) comes to the party with their dad; Lennon encourages Allison to finally get with her longtime crush Dylan (Ezekiel Goodman). Allison doesn’t appreciate the encouragement, and the two of them get into a fight about how Allison is a prude and Lennon sleeps with everyone to get what she wants.

Lennon decides to get back at Allison by seducing Dylan herself. When Allison sees the two of them afterwards, it leads to a huge blowup between the two. Lennon runs out to her car to have a moment, but that’s when Dylan, Riley, Margot (Brianne Tju) and Johnny (Sebastian Amoruso) get in the car, to get some post-party eats.

On their way to wherever they’re going, Allison hits something. Dylan thinks it’s a goat, which there are a lot of in the area. But when they get out of the car, they find out that they ran over someone. And that someone comes as a shock to all of them. They disagree on how to handle this mess, and they carry the body out to the caves by the water and let the body get washed out to sea.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The setting is different, and of course this takes place 24 years later, but the plot of I Know What You Did Last Summer is more or less the same as the 1997 film of the same name — with one big exception, as we’ll state below.

Our Take: We’re going to issue a SPOILER ALERT on this one, because to discuss the first episode, we need to discuss the big twist.

Ok, with that out of the way, we’d like to say that the big twist is something that showrunner Sara Goodman (Preacher, Gossip Girl) likely wanted audiences to figure out early. There was something about Lennon near the end of the first episode that didn’t look like her partying self, and it wasn’t just because she was upset with Allison. In fact, it didn’t seem like crying in her car would be something the party-hearty Lennon would do.

But a clue pops up in the middle of the episode — Allison’s only vice, it seems — that projects exactly what’s going on, if you were paying attention at the beginning of the episode, as Lennon is driving back home in her Jeep. So it stands to reason that the big reveal isn’t all that big at all.

The rest of the season will play out as the film — and the 1973 book it was based on — does, just in expanded form. Each of Lennon’s “OG” crew will get violently knocked off as the person who knows what happened last summer does his or her business. What we’re wondering is: What will fill in the rest of the eight-episode limited series? Will it be stories about the (currently generic) parents, about Courtney (Cassie Beck), who cleans Lennon’s house?

The prospect of what additional story can be added into what we’ve already seen is intriguing, but it’s also rife with peril, with the potential to send the audience on a wild goose chase of information. We’re hoping Goodman and her staff are able to focus on the task of hand and bring whatever else they’re bringing into the story in a sensible fashion.

Sex and Skin: There’s a lot of weird gratuitousness in the party scene, like a shot of a male partygoer peeing off a diving board, manhood out for all to see. Yet there are no actual sex scenes in the episode.

Parting Shot: We see what is dripping blood inside of Lennon’s closet. Let’s just say it has something to do with what they think they hit the year before.

Sleeper Star: Ezekiel Goodman, who plays Dylan, has that nerdy but brooding aura that indicates his character will be the most wracked with guilt.

Most Pilot-y Line: We really, really want to know what was in that nasal sprayer that Lennon called “cereal.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s enough intrigue around this version of the I Know What You Did Last Summer story to invest the 6 hours needed to watch this miniseries. But we’re also wondering if the show will be interesting enough to make you wonder if that 6 hours was well spent after you’re done watching.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream I Know What You Did Last Summer On Prime Video