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

The 2000s were a weird time for horror sequels. Studios had figured out that nobody wanted to watch a part 7 of anything anymore and so had resorted to shiny, flashy remakes to keep those all-popular brand names from the 70s and 80s on the big screen where they belonged. However, if your franchise had the misfortune to start in the 90s or later, chances are you were about to drag your exhausted carcass through the direct-to-DVD section of its career as it was simply too soon to deliver you a big budget reboot powered mostly on giving nostalgia a face lift.
Some series – like Scream – managed to sustain themselves nicely until the era of the legacy sequel could juice them up further, but others, such as Wrong Turn, Species and Urban Legend found themselves trapped in the sludge of having every last penny ruthlessly milked out of them by dirt cheap follow-ups. However, in the world of destitute horror sequels, there were none quite so threadbare as 2006’s I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer.

It’s July 4th in the town of Broken Ridge, Colorado and Amber Williams’ friend circle decide to stage a “hilarious” prank where they think it’ll be a great idea to dress one of their number up as the legendary Fisherman Killer (as in he’s a killer fisherman, not that he preys on them) and pretend to murder one of their own. Fucking hilarious, right? Well, not really, because after the prank goes horribly wrong, one of their member ends up getting fatally impaled on a tractor which makes the rest of the gang suddenly clam up, burn the evidence and keep a terrible secret that erodes their friendship like acid.
A year passes and Amber returns to Broken Ridge to find everything just as shit as she’d left it. Her former boyfriend, Colby, is even more of an angry shitheel than before, estranged best friend Zoe still has dreams of being a famous pop star and the skateboarding P.J. is unsurprisingly still dead – but not long after returning, Amber gets a rather sinister welcome back from a mysterious source who texts her the message “I know what you did last summer” around 50 times on her phone.
Before you know it, the group is trapped within a deadly mystery as someone has figured out their misguided prank and subsequent blaming of the actual Fisherman Killer as the culprit and soon their number and anyone around their group circle start to get whittled down by a hook wielding assailant wearing a fisherman’s slicker – which is pretty odd for Colorado.
Can Amber and her surviving buddies figure out who is killing them before they’re all hook bait? Could it be the town sheriff, or maybe his equally suspicious deputy – or maybe it might actually be the original Fisherman Killer who first struck nine years ago all the way in North Carolina. Nah, the filmmakers wouldn’t be that fucking stupid, would they?

In case you were wondering – yes, the filmmakers really were that fucking stupid. But passive aggressive spoilers aside, the absolutely ludicrous killer reveal is actually one of the least damaging aspects of I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, which really does hint at how virtually unwatchable it truly is. Sure, the original I Know… may have always been eclipsed by its flasher, snarkier cousin, Scream; but for all it’s faults, it was a watchable, more traditional slasher/murder mystery that was far more interested in its young cast as actual people than just how they were going to get butchered. Obviously, the Bahamas-set sequel was fairly turgid, but compared to this third entry, even I Still Know What You Did Last Summer comes across like some sort of minor masterpiece as this belated and painfully unnecessary third entry may actually be one of the worst horror sequels I have ever seen – and I’ve seen all the Children Of The Corns.
Director Sylvain White (who went on to direct Stomp The Yard, The Losers, and Slender Man) delivers possibly one of the worst looking movies of the decade that uses so much of that awful, jittery, music video, editing style that occurred during the 2000s, I genuinely thought it was some mind control tactic to keep your bored ass awake while the movie essentially walks in the same basic footprints as the original. Also, the director tries to employ a constantly moving handheld camera to try and give the dialogue scenes some desperately needed urgency, however, it just comes off that either the cameraman’s arm has gotten tired or he’s just dozing off due to how uninspired everything is. Actually, I’d wager the latter as the picture quality is so bad, it suggests that the whole film was shot on the cheapest camcorder the producers could rustle up on such short notice.

The cast prove to be just as uninspired and while it’s easy to poke fun at the sheer ninties-ness of Jennifer Love Hewitt in a push up bra yelling “What are you waiting for!?” while she jumped up and down, at least she brought some pizazz to the film. Here virtually all the cast have the same glassy eyed, empty stare as Freddie Prince Jr. had, as they all deliver their lines with the passion of a beached trout and you just can’t wait until they die.
But even then there’s no respite, because after three movies (and a bunch of Candyman entries), I guess we’ve all now run out of ideas about how to kill someone with a hook in an original fashion. Some deaths are uninspired, some poorly shot and others are just plain boring, but it’s tough to feel bad for a bunch of teens who got into this mess by planning a prank so bad, they were relying on a fucking mattress to save the dumb goof who agreed to “fake” falling off a roof. I guess, at some point, murder just becomes natural selection I guess…
This leads us to I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer’s most weirdly contentious point that is constantly alternating in my brain about whether it’s the best or worst decision the movie actually makes. As ive already alluded to, when we get to the finale, the big twist is that the Fisherman Killer isn’t a copycat at all, but is actually an undead Ben Willis (now played by former Michael Myers actor Don Shanks) who now appears to punish people on July 4th who accidentally killed someone the year prior. Now, ignoring for a start that that’s an extraordinarily stringent set of rules to invoke a ghost (it’s way more complicated than just saying his name five times in a mirror or just going to camp), but to suddenly give the guy a Friday The 13th Part 6 makeover actually goes against everything the first movie was supposed to be about. On the other hand, the plot twist is just so fucking stupid, I couldn’t help but just laugh at how desperate it is which actually raised my enjoyment levels a tiny amount.

Despite I’ll Always Know…’s best efforts to drive the franchise into the ground with the force of a cruise missile, the franchise is due to receive an honorary pardon thanks to the fact that it has a bona fide legacy sequel due out soon. However, not even the deserved expulsion from continuity will ever protect us from a direct-to-DVD sequel so bad, it made me want to write threatening notes to the cast and crew stating that I’ll always know what they filmed last 2006.
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