The Amazon Reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer Is Almost Nothing Like the Classic Movie

Unlike the 1997 film, Amazon's reboot has a completely new (and quite odd) setting for the horror series in a fictional Hawaiian town called Wai Huna. It also has an incredibly younger cast with all new characters to get familiar with — from the newly graduated, drug-crazed friend group to the strange adults in the town. Madison Iseman plays both twin sisters Lennon and Alison, Brianne Tju plays her best friend/lover Margot, and Ezekiel Goodman plays Dylan, the troubled fling who gets caught between the twins. Other faces in the cast include Ashley Moore (Riley), Sebastian Amoruso (Johnny), and Spencer Sutherland (Dale).

The car accident scene is pretty much where the similarities between the movie and the show begin and end. That, and the core of the series still follows the plot where a group of friends are being haunted a year later for leaving someone for dead on a wild summer night. What lies ahead of the car accident is a much more twisted (and pretty confusing) story.

Unlike the movie, where the group of teens leave a stranger dead on the side of the road, the Amazon series wastes no time in letting us know who the victim is. But it's with this that it draws us in in a sinister way to pull on our heartstrings. This time around, the teens believe that they have hit and killed twin Alison with their car (who's actually the one driving the car, but we'll get to that later), so they try their best to dispose of her body safely without blowing their cover and getting caught in a scheme of manslaughter. After the first four episodes, the teens think the person haunting them and killing people around their town is Alison, but the plot twist is that the person they think they killed is actually Alison's twin sister, Lennon — yeah, mind blown.

Since the series isn't set in an old fishing town like the original movie, we think it's safe to assume that the killer is not, in fact, a hook-wielding fisherman. Instead, a couple of theories floating around of who the killer may be point to either Dylan, Lennon and Alison's father Bruce (played by Bill Heck), or the mysterious Clara (played by Brooke Bloom), who finds and unveils the victim's body in tact an entire year after the car accident (strange, we know).

Now this is the main part where Amazon abandons most of the plot from the original '90s film. The fisherman killer is slashed from the gory series and replaced with the idea of twin sisters at odds, where one ends up accidentally killing the other. Knowing the difference between the two is hugely important to the plot because who we originally think is responsible for the car accident and who the victim actually ends up being turns out to be the complete opposite.

Similar to most things set in present day, Amazon's I Know What You Did Last Summer caters deeply to Gen Z and its obsession with social media. And oddly enough, the show also comes off like a strange cross between HBO's Euphoria, teen vloggers, and OnlyFans. Stay with us now, this will make sense in minute. During the graduation party scene, the teens are basically pros when it comes to doing drugs and having sex. So much so that Lennon creates her own pseudo-profile for her online NSFW activities under her sister's name, and it features videos that also star her good friend Margot. Speaking of Margot, her life as a popular vlogger is also spotlighted on the show in several ways that point out just how shallow that lifestyle can be for some.

Neither of these things seem to serve much of a purpose for the show's plot, other than the fact that Lennon (assumed to be an alive Alison) is getting blackmailed by her sister after she receives a text with a link to her old sex tapes — which also includes a video with Dylan, go figure. We're not too sure what the intentions are behind this complex web of social media tie-ins, but we're hoping that the series will eventually clear up the confusion in the next batch of episodes.