I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006)

Directed by Sylvain White

I could finish this review in one sentence. The director of I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer is the same person who directed Slenderman and this is just as bad. If you are one of the unlucky few who actually saw Slenderman then you know exactly what’s in store for us today! If you are blissfully ignorant of the horrors of Slenderman, don’t worry, I’ll tell you exactly why this movie should not be watched by anyone. Time for a venting session, because I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is Citizen Kane compared to this.

What Passes For A Story In This Movie.

Picking up a few years after the last film, I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer features a group of friends in a small Colorado town eager to start their no doubt glamorous and exciting post High School lives. After pulling a confusing prank that involves someone pretending to be the serial killer from the previous films and attacking the local 4th of July carnival, the height of comedy, something goes tragically wrong and a friend dies in a sad but nonsensical way. Certain that if their involvement in this gets out it will ruin their chances of escaping this town, the group agrees to tell no one exactly what happened tonight. Everything seems to be going okay, that is until these teens start receiving the fateful message, “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” 

What’s The Word For Movies Where Nothing Happens? Is It Good?

The biggest problem is that the plot and the pacing of the movie are so incredibly off kilter that the runtime feels ten times longer than it is, and that’s not because the story is bad, but because there isn’t a story. There are exactly two kinds of scenes here, the first is where someone receives a message that someone knows what they did last summer, usually in a way that is silly like having it written in water by a pool or having it scratched into their motorcycle, and two when one of these bland teenagers is worried that the killer is after them right before the killer attacks, and then he does. These are the only kinds of scenes here because there is no plot progression, no investigation, nothing anyone can do to stop this, these things just happen.

These Characters Are All, Like, Too Cool To Care.

It is impossible to overstate how much that destroys the pacing. This may not have been a problem if, say, the characters were good or there was some decent atmosphere. Then maybe the waiting could have had some anxiety to it, but the atmosphere is nonexistent and the characters are…weird. I don’t know if this is an acting thing or a scrip thing but only one person seems really bothered about their friend being dead, and they are not the main character. If these people don’t care, then why should I? Why should I care about the petty dramas of these teenagers that have no connection to anything important happening? It’s impossible. So the majority of this movie is staring at people you don’t care about and waiting for something to happen. At least we have the strange transitions to keep us company.

We’ll Always Have Teleportation Mountains.

One of the more interesting things in I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer is that they didn’t know how to transition between sequences, so frequently between scenes we see shots of the nearby mountain range. Not just when people are on the mountains though, usually this shot is completely unrelated to what is happening. There’ll be two scenes in sequence that happen in town but for some reason there’s a shot of the mountains between them, and this happens so often you could make a drinking game out of it. Maybe there’s some deep I Know What You Did Last Summer lore about mountains having teleporting powers, or maybe the filmmakers realized that everything in the movie looks so bland and samey that they had to spice it up with unrelated footage and musical interludes. 

Did The Producers’ Kids Have Bands?

Yes, there are musical interludes here. One of the teens is in a band, one that is of course right on the cusp of their big break, so we definitely have to see them perform at a talent show that somehow isn’t cancelled even when the annual carnival is cancelled for safety reasons. And no, this is not an offscreen performance or even a short clip, this band plays a full song and we see and hear every second of it. It’s not a terrible song but it happens right before the climax of the movie when everything is supposed to ramp up! If you have to put a filler musical scene then fine, shove it in the middle somewhere and hope we don’t notice how out of place it is, don’t put it in the ONE SPOT it should not be! And even after the performance is done and the teens are all getting chased by the killer, clips of the next bands to perform are edited between shots of people running in fear! Why?!?

Maybe This Was All An Elaborate Prank?

It feels like the writer and editor were playing a prank on the director but he didn’t get the joke and just went with the bizarre choices they made. Like, the editor sarcastically suggests that they can just use mountain footage to bridge two scenes that have no clear transition and the director said, “Yes, of course, do that.” so the rest of the cast and crew had to see what they could get away with. The writer chimes in, “Is it okay if the cops find a guy with a slit throat in a room where there was clearly a struggle and then immediately conclude it was a suicide?” “Go for it!”, the director replies. I have to admit, this movie becomes a lot more enjoyable when I’m imagining it as a series of escalating pranks, because that at least would mean that someone was enjoying themselves on set.

The Ending Is So Aggressively Dumb I Have To Spoil It.

By far the dumbest thing storywise is the climax of the film, where the killer’s identity is revealed. The teens concluded the killer must have been someone local, because the Fisherman killer died at the end of the 2nd movie and there’s no way he could be in this backwoods Colorado town. But, in a twist that I 100% called, it is the same killer, because now the Fisherman is a zombie ghost who…is summoned by people not reporting their involvement in accidental deaths to the police? That’s dumb by itself, but its made worse by having the Fisherman be undead and reduced to a low-rent Jason knockoff whose only weakness is giant hooks. Why would someone whose signature weapon is a giant hook be uniquely weak to giant hooks, you ask? I have no idea. I assume this was another prank.

There’s a lot wrong with this movie that sounds fun, and maybe it would be with friends and drinks, but mostly this movie is just really boring. It doesn’t have the energy of the second movie or the polish that the first one had, so we’re left with a trite script that meanders from dead teenager to dead teenager with zero style. I read that there were limitations on the budget and time-frame of the filming of this movie so I guess that could explain a lot of the problems, but that doesn’t make the viewing any less painful. And to make it even worse, no streaming service I could find wanted this movie (and I checked all I could) so I had to pay three American dollars to watch this crap. It was not worth it. Not worth the money or the time.