I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		2.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		2.5

I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer Blu-ray Movie Review

Long, weary sigh...

Reviewed by Kenneth Brown November 28, 2023

I was there, in a not-so-comfy Regal seat, when director Jim Gillespie's tag-along slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer carved its way into theaters, hot on the heels of Wes Craven's 1996 slasher revitalization project, Scream. (Which was penned by Kevin Williamson, who wrote, wait for it... I Know What You Did Last Summer. It all connects!) But Gillespie's little horror gem had a hot cast, a killer premise and a throwback baddie in a raincoat wielding a giant rusty hook. It was decent. More than decent to some. Hell, it made $126 million worldwide, which was nothing to shake a machete at in the late '90s. It even bloodied up the box office enough to greenlight a sequel that released a year later, 1998's I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, jettisoning Williamson, retaining Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr., and teaming the smooth-faced duo with a whole new group of victims. Did I see Still in the theater? Maybe? Yes? No? That tells you how forgettable it was, cause if it was a horror movie in the '90s or early 2000s, I almost certainly dropped $7 on it at the local cinema. But the Summer series died a cold, lonely death then and there, with the second entry earning a meager $40 million. Ooph.

But wait, what's that shambling away from an open grave? Why, it's 2006 direct-to-video threequel I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, a bit of low-budget drudgery that absolutely no one asked for! A movie I don't even remember coming out. And I can see why. Number Three is a such a mess, such a flaming dumpster-fire of a slasher that I need to use the next paragraph to take some deep breaths and re-center my thoughts...

Drive away. Problem solved. Go on, get in a car.

Several teenagers in smalltown Colorado -- who could remain nameless but what the heck: Amber Williams ('Animorphs's Brooke Nevin), her boyfriend Colby Patterson ('Final Destination 2's David Paetkau) and their friends Zoe ('One Tree Hill's Torrey DeVitto), Roger (Seth Packard), and PJ (Clayton Taylor) -- concoct a July 4th prank based on a frightening legend. As bad luck would have it, though, the prank goes horribly awry when the young man playing the "victim" of a fish-hook killer ends up dead. The five teens agree to keep their involvement in the tragic skateboarding accident (yes, you read that correctly) a secret from the authorities, who continue to search for the man who apparently murdered their friend. A year later, with the annual July 4th celebration approaching, Amber, Colby, Zoe, Roger and PJ discover they’re being stalked by someone who clearly intends on keeping a horrific legend alive by killing them off, one by one.

The plot of I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer is as inane as its title. But more on the plot in a second. I Know What You Did Last Summer was a wordy title but catchy. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer was a mouthful but still kinda worked. This one? Goodness. What's next? I'll Sometimes Know What You Did Last Summer, I'll Occasionally, If Asked By the Authorities but Not By Anyone Else Tell Someone What You Did Last Summer, maybe This One Time I Thought I Knew What You Did Last Summer but I Was Mistaken, Until I Wasn't and Stumbled Upon a Murder that Taps Into My Latent Psycho-Sexual Fantasies, Giving Me An Excuse to Kill People Because I Know They're Secretly Killers Too, Mwa Ha Ha, Oh Yeah and I'm Ratting You Out. Or just stop making bad sequels to a decent flick, especially when you no longer have anyone from the original cast.

But it gets worse. The script is minced together with tropes and cliches, tapping into all the old slasher standbys while acting as if we actually know any of these people, much less care about them. Stephen M. Katz's cinematography doesn't help either. It's a tilting, juking, dashing, darting shaky-cam parade of cheap, outdated film-school techniques crammed into one semi-cohesive feature. The story is as basic as they come but the photography somehow makes it terribly confusing. Dutch angles and sweeping pans are par for the course but Katz's camera soars and falls, turns and swerves, catches the light and ducks into the shadows, jumps up and suddenly... cuts! To the Fisherman, who for some reason always looks like a production assistant haphazardly draped a raincoat and hat on a bizarrely thin square-shouldered mannequin. More than once I swore the killer was two broom handles tied together, scarecrow style. The design hides the identity of the killer, I suppose, but it looks all kinds of ridiculous, particularly when lightning flashes, splashing the rain-drizzled trash bag-black outerwear with blue light. And whodunnit? It doesn't matter. Him, or him, or her. By the time the mask, er, hat comes off and the hook drops for the last time you'll have already checked out.

How did it all go so wrong? That's where I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer earns a bit of my sympathy. Director Sylvain White (who would go onto direct The Losers in 2010 and Slender Man in 2018) was hired two weeks prior to filming after his predecessor was fired. Not only did White have two weeks to prep, he had to put together a new cast, choose locations, organize the production, come up with special effects, and design a suitable looking Summer series killer. I can't imagine. Would the threequel have fared better had White had more time? Who can say? No amount of nightmare production scenarios can excuse the ultimate reveal of the movie's killer, which takes a sharp right turn, straight off a peer into Friday the 13th-sequels waters. But the production problems do go a long way to explaining just how piecemeal and slapped together the film plays.

I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer hit theaters in 2006, at the height of the Blu-ray/HD DVD war. I'm not sure why it took the threequel seventeen more years to finally choose Blu-ray, but here it is, looking exactly like a middling BD from 2006. Artifical sharpening and edge halos, macroblocking and banding, subpar black leveling, inconsistent constrast... it's a tour of all the old high definition presentation killers. Sony's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer is every bit as dated as the film. Even colors bounce all over the place; lifelike here, undersaturated there, cold to the touch over yonder. Each scene looks as if it's been lifted from a different movie. Detail is decent, but only insofar as hyper-sharpened imagery tends to appear in more pleasing, less problematic shots. The tighter the frame and the stiller the subject, the more refined and revealing the textures, and the less you'll notice any signs of the aforementioned issues. But the moment the view pulls back to a wide shot, look out. I'm not exactly sure why we're getting Always now. Completists can rejoice I guess. Everyone else will wonder why in God's name this, over any number of other unreleased catalog titles, got any high definition attention from the studio.

I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Summer's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track does the best it can with what it's handed but the production's sound design, sadly, is a lot like the film itself. Voices are clear enough, though there are plenty of prioritization issues, clarity inconsistencies and scenes where the music comes on a tad too strong. Likewise, the rear speakers offer a fair amount of activity but it always feels rather detached from the rest of the mix, delivering directional effects that don't move throughout the soundfield as much as they appear and disappear at will. LFE output is solid, weighty even, but lacks convincing weight, and much of the overall track has a thinness and an occasional tininess that's flat and uninvolving. The film ultimately sounds ok, and I suspect it has little to do with the quality of the track, but the experience as a whole is merely average.

I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The Blu-ray release of I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer offers a commentary with director Sylvain White, a 27-minute making-of featurette, and the film's trailer.

I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's the Blu-ray release of the long-awaited direct-to-video sequel from 2006 we've all been waiting for. I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, a flick most of us didn't even know existed. And oh man, it's bad. Sony's Blu-ray release also appears to hail from 2006, where a bag of cheap upgrade tricks could make a high definition presentation look super, ultra, uber-sharp. Now we realize how bad that actually looks, and the original image beneath it isn't much better. And with only a handful of special features, the highlight of the disc emerges as an average DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track. Skip this one.