I Know What You Did Last Summer: The Complete Series (Blu-ray Review)
DIRECTED BY: Craig William Macneill, Logan Kibens
STARRING: Madison Iseman, Bill Heck, Brianne Tju
RATED: UR/Region: O/2:00/1080P/NUMBER OF DISCS 3
AVAILABLE FROM Sony Pictures
When I first heard there was going to be a television adaptation of I Know What You Did Last Summer, I figured somebody had finally realized the original concept was tailor-made for a slasher series. A group of guilty teenagers being hunted by a mysterious killer over the course of multiple episodes? Sounds like a no-brainer.
Unfortunately, the Amazon series apparently looked at that simple premise and decided, “What if we made everyone as unlikeable as possible and then buried the slasher elements under a mountain of melodrama?”
The result is I Know What You Did Last Summer: The Complete Series, a one-season wonder that somehow managed to make audiences nostalgic for a movie whose killer literally ran around dressed like a fisherman.
To be fair, the show isn’t completely without merit. The production values are solid, the Hawaiian setting gives it a unique look, and there are a few kills scattered throughout that remind you this was supposed to be a horror series. Some of the murder sequences are nasty enough to wake viewers up after they’ve spent forty minutes listening to characters make terrible life decisions.
The biggest problem is that the show never seems to understand why people liked I Know What You Did Last Summer in the first place. Instead of leaning into suspense, mystery, and slasher fun, the series spends an alarming amount of time focused on relationship drama, secrets, betrayals, and enough soap-opera nonsense to make daytime television blush. At times it feels less like a horror show and more like a CW series that accidentally wandered onto the wrong streaming service.
The characters don’t help matters. The original film had flawed teenagers. This show has a cast of people who make you actively root for the killer. Every episode introduces new reasons to dislike somebody, which is admittedly impressive in its own way. By the halfway point, the mystery isn’t “Who is the killer?” but rather “Can the killer please hurry up?”
Even the big twists struggle to land. The series constantly tries to shock viewers, but many of the reveals feel like they exist solely because somebody in the writers’ room confused unpredictability with good storytelling. There’s a difference between surprising an audience and making them stare blankly at the screen wondering if they missed an episode.
As for the Blu-ray release itself, the presentation is quite good. The show looks sharp, the tropical locations pop nicely in high definition, and the audio gets the job done. In many ways, the Blu-ray presentation is the most polished thing about the entire production.
Ultimately, I Know What You Did Last Summer: The Complete Series isn’t completely terrible. There are flashes of a decent slasher series hidden somewhere beneath the endless drama and questionable creative decisions. The problem is that those moments are buried so deeply that finding them feels like an archaeological expedition.
It’s not the worst horror television ever made. It’s simply one of the more baffling examples of a series taking a perfectly workable premise and spending ten episodes trying desperately to be anything except what fans actually wanted. At least the killer understood the assignment, even if the rest of the show didn’t.
