One of my most distinct moviegoing memories from my childhood was seeing the post-Scream teen slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer with my parents opening weekend. As an exclusive new track from my then-favorite band played over the end credits (“Proud,” by KoЯn), I was in 12-year-old nü-metal brat heaven, beaming in delight. That’s when my father leaned over and whispered in a firm, disappointed tone, “You never get to pick the movie again.” Three decades later, I’m older now than my father’s age was then, and I totally get it. This mildly violent teenage melodrama must be torturously tedious for any adult outside its very narrow target demographic (gloomy Millennials who were 12—and exactly 12—years old in 1997). In retrospect, I can’t believe that I dragged my parents to see it in a theater, regardless of how giddy it made me personally. Even more so, I can’t believe that some poor parent my age now is about to suffer the same fate via legacyquel. Must we forever be tormented by the sins of our mall-goth past? Can’t the world finally forgive & forget what we did that summer? Will there ever be peace in the suburbs?

All of your favorite late-90s teen stars are here: Sarah Michelle Gellar as a small-town beauty queen, Ryan Phillipe as her spoiled fuckboy sweetheart, Freddie Prinze Jr. as the townie interloper who’s desperate to earn his way into his friend group’s tax bracket, and Jennifer Love Hewitt as the only normal, well-adjusted youngster among them. The four bright young things get into trouble one night after partying on the beach outside their small fishing village, when they accidentally strike & kill a pedestrian crossing a dimly lit road and dump his body into a nearby bay to avoid hassle from the law. A year later, this act of semi-voluntary manslaughter haunts all four of the now-estranged kids involved, derailing their professional & educational ambitions as they quietly stew in the isolation of their own guilt & grief. The haunting becomes a lot more literal when a mysterious killer dressed in a fisherman slicker starts picking them off one by one via fish hook, seemingly avenging their hit-and-run victim from beyond the grave. If you’ve seen any formulaic teen slasher, you’ve seen it all before (doubly so if you’ve seen 1985’s The Mutilator); you just haven’t seen it performed by this era-specific cast.

I Know What You Did Last Summer splits the difference between an 80s teen slasher & a 50s road-to-ruin PSA about the perils of reckless driving, updated with a totally 90s cast & an astonishingly shitty 90s soundtrack (including, among other atrocities, covers of “Summer Breeze” by Type O Negative and “Hey Bulldog” by Toad the Wet Sprocket). It’s a little too squeamish about bloodshed to be an effective horror film, slaying most of its victims offscreen and keeping their corpses on ice like freshly caught fish so they don’t stink up the place. It is relatively compelling as an afterschool melodrama, however, with the two main girls’ increasingly grim home lives leading to a few memorable scenes that outperform the undead fisherman’s kills. Its lack of slasher-genre ingenuity is a little surprising given that the screenplay was written by Kevin Williamson one year after he penned the meta-horror hit Scream, which is much smarter about reshaping & reexamining the slasher formula from new angles. His trademark post-modernism enters the frame in an early scene where the teens in peril share campfire stories of the urban legend about a killer with a hook for a hand before suffering an updated version of it in real life, but the same idea was pushed much further in the next year’s Urban Legend, leaving this one effectively moot.

It’s easy to point out the ways in which I Know What You Did Last Summer falls short of 90s slasher greatness, but it’s by no means the worst of Kevin Williamson’s post-Scream teen horror scripts (that would be Teaching Mrs. Tingle). If nothing else, its coastal fishing village on the 4th of July setting affords it some occasional distinguishing novelty, not least of all in the multiple parade sequences featuring gigantic paper mâché fish on wheels. Thanks to Williamson’s previous commercial triumph, it was also made in a time when these teen bodycount movies were produced with robust Hollywood budgets behind them, so director Jim Gillespie (of Venom “fame”) gets to make frequent use of swooping crane shots to liven up the dialogue-heavy melodrama. Still, of all the 90s properties to continually get serialized & rebooted, it makes no sense that something this generic is still being kept alive as Horror Icon IP instead of, say, the more stylish & memorable Williamson-penned classic The Faculty. I pity the poor parents whose pre-teens are going to drag them to the theater for the latest legacyquel addition to the I Know What You Did franchise this summer because they have a crush on one of its famous-only-to-children stars. It’s a tradition that’s gone on for far too long, dragging on since the long-gone days of Soul Asylum, Our Lady Peace, and KoЯn.

-Brandon Ledet