Outside the Blue Box: I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

It’s tough to look around in any media these days without the concept of a reboot being thrust in front of your unsuspecting face. ‘Don’t you remember how much you LOVED this film/TV show/game/song? Don’t you want to see it AGAIN? But this time slightly DIFFERENT?’ It’s always struck me as a strange concept, in the age of streaming, that so many new versions of old media pop up without even an attempt to capture the essence of their original, which can now be accessed in a full HD render, therefore putting their offspring to shame. It is however lamentingly, the way things work now, as movie makers attempt to tap into those guaranteed audiences. One such victim of reboot syndrome is 1997’s teen slasher I Know What you Did Last Summer which, having launched the careers of its quartet of teen stars and garnered ‘cult status’ with horror fandom, saw a 2025 reboot after 28 years. One of these iterations of new tortured teens is played by British actor Jonah Hauer-King, already half way up the Hollywood ladder with lead roles in Disney’s The Little Mermaid live action reboot and schmaltzy dog-lovers movie A Dogs Way Home. While being chased across New England by IKWYDLS’s hook-handed killer, Hauer-King was also filming a little local British show that has itself been rebooted at least 15 times over the last 60-odd years – Doctor Who.

Series 15 of Who got off to a bumpy start following the departure of companion Ruby (Millie Gibson) and mixed reviews for the Moffat-penned Christmas special Joy To The World. With new companion, Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) stepping into Ruby’s still warm shoes and finding her dynamic with the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa), episode 4’s Lucky Day feels like an odd fish, barely featuring either lead actor. While Doctor-lite episodes are a well-worn trope, especially of showrunner RTD’s tenure, this episode backtracks to feature previous companion Ruby and the wider UNIT team, with Hauer-King playing Ruby’s love interest/secret antagonist Conrad Clarke.

We first meet Conrad as a child, where a brief encounter with The Doctor and Belinda kicks off a lifelong interest, leading him to track down the Tardis years later, where Ruby and the Time Lord save him from a blood-thirsty alien called The Shreek. A year later, after appearing as a guest on his podcast discussing her time with the Doctor, Ruby agrees to a date with Conrad and the two start a relationship. Suspecting that the Shreek are still after Conrad, Ruby calls in UNIT, only for Conrad to reveal he has set up Ruby to expose UNIT as a false organisation and a drain on taxpayers’ money, his relationship with Ruby being merely a ruse to expose UNIT to the world. Conrad leads a public revolt against UNIT and breaks into it’s London tower while livestreaming, where Kate Lethbridge Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) uses a captured Shreek to terrify him into admitting he was wrong. His story doesn’t end there however, when following being sprung from jail by Mrs.Flood/the Rani, Conrad becomes the centre piece of her bizarre false world to entrap the Doctor, wishing on the baby-God Desiderium for the world to become a sort of heteronormative suburban dystopia. His downfall comes at the hands of Ruby, who uses the last wish to give him happiness and end his wish world. He’s last spotted as a cook in a café, laughing with colleagues.

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Theres no doubt that Conrad was envisioned as a strong, real world RTD-style foe. He is psychologically interesting – able to deceive Ruby effectively while rallying troops around him in his quest to stir division. An effective communicator as well as incredibly driven, he’s like the inverse Amy Pond, meeting The Doctor at an early stage of his life and taking it to a dark place, one of fear and hatred, as opposed to wonder and excitement. Following the events of Lucky Day, he displays his villainous strength effectively when brought upon the Tardis, as he tells a gloating Doctor “I don’t accept your reality Doctor, I reject it. So put me back in my prison and get off my world”. The concept of a public rebellion against the Doctor, led by someone like Conrad, is such an interesting story, but for whatever reason it wasn’t to be.

Instead, we next see Conrad effectively babysitting Desiderium within the Rani’s bone temple in Wish World, series 15’s finale. This is a different Conrad – tired and alone, like a little boy seeking approval, the bravado we saw in his jail cell replaced by fear and confusion. Unfortunately, that’s where the characterisation of Conrad ends, as Ruby breaks him psychologically and he’s revealed to be much weaker than he seems, desperate for a family and easily defeated with a wish by Ruby. In this confused series, he’s not the only misogynist. Episode 1, The Robot Revolution, sees the Doctor face off against the sexist and obsessional Alan Budd, who attempts to marry Belinda after taking over a planet named after her. It’s odd to have two similarly minded foes in the space of a few episodes, but I suppose Conrad doesn’t voice anything overly sexist, despite his wish world depicting women solely as wives and mothers. Hauer-King plays the empowered Conrad extremely well, the flip between sweet and genuine to snide and conspiratorial is masterfully portrayed. But even he looks lost in the finale, unsure of how or why Conrad is in this position, meaning his portrayal lacks any emotional heft, his happy conclusion not only undeserved but worse still, forgettable.

Thousands of miles away, in sunny Southport, North Carolina, it’s been nearly 30 years since hook-handed serial killer Ben Willis stalked and murdered several teens after they inadvertently left him for dead the year before. That story has become legend in the town, and local officials are keen to shake it off to improve tourism, so it’s not ideal when similar murders start once again, this time focussing on a new group of teens who very coincidentally find themselves inadvertently causing a car accident and death the summer before. When the teens begin to receive scrawled notes saying ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’, suspicion starts to fly. Is the serial killer Ben Wallace back from the dead? Does it have anything to do with the creepy town Pastor? Only the survivors of the 1997 massacre can help, having lived it once already, but will they? This is a spoiler-free review, go watch the film to find out (and prepare for a film even a Sarah Michelle Gellar cameo can’t save).

Hauer-King plays Milo, one of the tortured teens. Handsome and hunky, Milo is an all-American post-teen who’s unlucky in love, having broken up with high school sweetheart Ava (played by Chase Sui Wonders) and never really gotten over it. He reconnects with his high school friends (and manslaughter accomplices) at the engagement drinks of Danica and best friend Teddy where his ‘fancy political job’ is referred to and convinces his friends to get high and go for a drive, where a series of bad decisions and general bad behaviour lead to an inciting accident which earmarks the pals for death. Milo is up for keeping the accident a secret, his time in politics obviously having had an effect already, much to the chagrin of ex-Ava, who wants to go to the police.

This puts the kybosh on a rekindling of their romance and changes the friendships of this once tight group, now disparate until Danica decides to have another engagement party having broken up with Teddy. None of the friends are functioning well with the secret and things get worse when the notes begin to show up and auxiliary characters begin to get murdered. Milo often plays peacemaker between the warring Teddy and Danica but is largely focussed on finding out who is behind the murders as well as reconnecting with Ava. Their investigations deepen when they find out the driver of the car was not the owner of the car and there’s a connection to the town’s weird Pastor, a potential suspect. While it seems that his romance with Ava may be getting back on track, following an awkward kink-shaming moment, he’s sadly dispatched by the killer, the first of his crew to fall, so he never does get to find out who was behind the murderous rampage.

Milo is pretty wishy-washy, as far as teen slasher victims go. He doesn’t stand out as a beacon of morality, as the goofy one, or the serious one, or even the dumb one – he’s very middle of the road. Hauer-King doesn’t have much to do in the role, save master the American accent (which he does, to be fair) and vary between looking pensive and love-lorn over the significantly more dynamic and animated Ava. Final girl material he is not, and his death isn’t as spectacular as his friend Teddy’s, who’s strung up like a freshly caught fish at the docks for all to see. It’s not Hauer-King’s fault that Milo is largely one dimensional – it’s written that way. Even the snippets of dialogue referring to the concept of wealth inequality that runs alongside the film isn’t explored. The main set pieces take place in the rich people’s giant houses and grounds as opposed to the grittier underbelly of Southport which is depicted in the first film. This sequel lacks the maturity of the first, ironically given its characters are older than the original teens featured, but they act younger, less mature, less developed – with Milo perhaps the least developed of them all.

Hauer-King already has a great CV for a 31-year-old, with high profile credits on both sides of the Atlantic. However, 2025 won’t go down as a stellar year for either of the franchises he features in, or the characters he was chosen to play. Following Wish World, the much-trumpeted era of RTD2 died a slow death, with an ill-fated Christmas special being pulled and the show put out to tender. We can blame some behind the scene shenanigans for the possible curtailing of Conrad’s character and one day it may come out, but all we have to go on is rumours. While I Know What You Did Last Summer wasn’t a box office failure by any means, it wasn’t received warmly by the critics, and any news of another sequel is practically non-existent (which doesn’t mean it won’t happen based on a superior mid-credit scene). Unfortunately for Hauer-King, his character is highly unlikely to be summoned from the dead for a cameo in any future movies, given the lack of impact he had. So Hauer-King has the dubious honour of starring in lead roles in two long running franchises, now put out to pasture. I guess if you can’t start something, you might as well finish it.

DAVID’S ARCHIVE – OUTSIDE THE BLUE BOX