Nothing bonds a group of friends like a murder on the eve of graduation.
With YOU and the reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer premiering on the same day, spooky season is off to an epic start.
The first four episodes dropped on Amazon Prime on October 15, with the remainder premiering weekly. The series is a modern take of the slasher thriller helmed by Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Geller two decades ago.
However, this version only has one thing in common with the original other than the title — it loosely adopts the premise of a group of teens covering up a murder and being haunted and hunt for it a year later.
For this review, I’ll focus on the first two episodes — the pilot titled “It’s Thursday” and the follow-up titled “It’s Not Just for Dog Shit” — which didn’t waste any time kicking the action into high gear.
Admittedly, the first half of the pilot was a little hazy, likely due to all the drugs and drinking at the party.
Plenty of unfamiliar yet good-looking characters were thrown our way, and it was a little hard to grasp who was who other than a group of soulless and obnoxious privileged teens, which makes it hard to root for them.
It was also pretty strange that parents were in attendance at this rave-like party and doing TikTok dances with their influencer teens, but I digress.
However, they don’t stay one-dimensional characters for long as the year-long gap allows them to mature and even show remorse at what they’ve done. It’s clear the deaths won’t just be for shock factor, but rather, a pivotal part in unraveling the storyline and the truth.
And despite being polar opposites, it didn’t help that it was nearly impossible to tell Lennon and Allie (Madison Iseman) apart save for the necklace from their late mother.
Again, that was likely the whole point as it lead to the juicy plot twist: the group of teens didn’t kill Lennon, they killed Allie who then assumed her broken yet popular sister’s identity upon covering up the murder.
After hitting “Allie” who was really party girl Lennon with the car, the teens left her in the same cave where her mother committed suicide and let the tide take care of it.
It’s a shakeup from typical slasher flicks that has the potential to take the storyline in several compelling directions and offer more substance than a two-hour movie ever could.
There were a few surprising twists, aside from the twin switch, that hooked you in (sadly, no hook-wielding, rain-jacket wearing villain here!).
A year after the murder, Lennon returns to town after her first year of college only to realize that she’s being taunted by someone who snuck into her house and left a bloody goat head in her closet along with the confession “I know what you did last summer” written in pink on her mirror.
Lennon tries to shrug it off as a sick prank, but obviously, we know better.
With the first kill gruesome kill in the books — poor Johnny, it was nice knowing ya! — it’s time to pinpoint some potential suspects as the show takes on the vibe of another classic slasher Scream.
- The woman at the cliffs is the only witness. Is this Carla who Lennon saw while visiting Dylan a year later? She looked pretty familiar. Or could this be their mother who is somehow still alive and living in the caves? They made it a huge point to emphasize that she died along with her “cult.”
- Lennon’s father may not be a saint after all. Since he immediately knew that Allie came home instead of Lennon, she broke down and told him everything. Instead of turning her in and losing two daughters, he helped her cover it up so that it looked like Allie ran away. While that may seem like good dad behavior, after the first kill, we see him cleaning a shovel that looks awfully like the murder weapon. He also gave Johnny a menacing look earlier in the episode when he thought the teen may have figured out that Lennon was Allie. How far would he go to keep his daughter’s secret?
- Courtney. Did you see the way she flung that possum or whatever? Enough said. Also, there’s just something off about her.
- Dylan may have been at the scene of the crime that night, but his whole speech about karma while setting up salt licks to feed the goats was suspect. Maybe it’s the ketamine?
- Dale. He drove by that night so he can place all of them, plus, he just strikes me as a strange human.
- Since all of these are kind of obvious, maybe it’s also the Chief of Police, who is sleeping with Lennon’s dad?
The reboot might not have much in common with the original film, but that isn’t always a bad thing.
It’s fun to breathe fresh life into a slasher to throw off the audience. The first two episodes showed just enough of their cards to convince us to deal another hand.
Let’s be honest, if we wanted a retelling of the original, we could always just watch it on VHS! There’s a reason why reboots continously find an audience. With this one, you get exactly what you signed up for.