Lionsgate (Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.)

“The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.” —Proverbs 29:25

“Ignorance is the parent of fear.” —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“It is good we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.” —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

The latest installment of the “Lionsgate (Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.)” franchise is directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson from a script she wrote with Sam Lansky. This being chapter four in the series and my not having seen parts two and three of the sequence, I admit to some lacunae in my understanding of the “slasher with the fishhook” evolution, but I can say that the 2025 installment is no better than its original incarnation. The new version looks like a cut and paste project, and not a particularly good one. It resembles a last-minute thrown-together term paper, disorganized, untethered to a theme and sadly desperate. I’d give it a grade of C-minus for at least being submitted on schedule, in this case, just in time for the summer movie season.

The original 1997 film at least had Kevin Williamson, the writer of the scarier and more self-deprecating “Scream” series, at the helm. Jim Gillespie, its serviceable but pedestrian director, put together some admirable action sequences while drawing out respectable performances from Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillipe. Unfortunately, their characters were eliminated by the film’s slasher, so we’re stuck once again with the lackluster remnants of that movie: the insipid pining of Jennifer Love Hewitt and the impressive cheekbones but amateur acting chops of Freddie Prinze Jr.. Hewitt looks like she’s on loan from the “Twilight” movies, while Prinze resembles the kind of nice guy types that Fred MacMurray used to play in the 1940s and 1950s, ones with some good qualities but no conscience.

Williamson and Gillespie may not be masters, but they aren’t hacks either. They understand that they need to add to a genre if they are going to steal from it. Fred Walton’s 1979 film, “When a Stranger Calls” and especially William Castle’s 1965 film, “I Saw What You Did” were obvious Williamson influences. Those may have been mediocre films, but their makers respected their craft and their audience enough to saddle their work with a clear premise and a strong moral foundation. They had a sense of humor about themselves and what they were doing, one that made them appear cultivated even when they used cheap ploys to exploit their viewers. The new “I Know…” movie has some funny bits which temper the violent scenes and are sometimes even inspired, but most of the jokes land flat, devolving into a morbid campiness of the “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” sort.

Sex has always the driving force behind these slasher films, even those made in the censor code-dominated 1960s. Hitchcock’s “Psycho” opens with an illicit romance taking place in a seedy hotel in the middle of the afternoon. However, that classic and others from the same period had moral compasses that went hand in hand with proficiency standards, both of which are absent in any of the “I Know…” projects, especially the current one. The actors who portray the teenagers give amateurish performances which are, in the end, apt for teenager characters who are greenhorns when it comes to facing what life throws at them. They are clueless about how to protect or rescue themselves from danger, and sadly, there are no adults around who can step in and save them from their enemies or from themselves. In the 1997 version the parents were detached; in today’s version, they are sinister. Unguided and untaught, these youngsters are grossly unqualified for rational thought, reasoning or sexual intimacy, in other words, for adulthood. They constitute a new “lost generation,” one unable to read, add or date at grade level.

Jennifer Robinson and her team do not touch on teen or young adult guilt as it would relate to a culture’s expanding shame. They prefer to focus on gender roles, beauty rituals, astrology, lesbian experimentation and gut—splattering instead of gut-wrenching violence. Robinson revels in ferocity and bloodletting, but she ignores their emotional, psychic and moral dimensions. The fisherman’s hook, reminiscent of but lacking the chilling and hellish impact of the one depicted in the iconic “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” drips with abundant hemoglobin but no portent. The killer’s masked face and dubious origins invokes memories of our shared Covid nightmare and its resultant aura of disorientation and distrust, but the now cliché slasher figure is losing relevance and becoming as boggy as its no longer slick rain gear. Gone is any trace of a monster that emerges not from a craggy sea but from the depths of one’s own guilty conscience.

Repeating the scenario of the crime basically verbatim from the earlier film does little to build upon what happened in 1997 or to redeem the prior movie’s inherent flaw, its inability to face the real consequences of committing a crime and covering it up. In Robinson’s version, a group of teenagers engage in some sexual banter, smoke marijuana, behave recklessly while driving, and cause a fatal roadside accident. After their victim dies, they cover up their act, and make a pact to keep it a secret while they go on with their lives. In 2025, instead of a look back and a move toward confession and reconciliation, the filmmakers give us a repeat without a rinse. No mention is made of crime, culpability or loss. Nobody even stops to ask each other or themselves: “what on earth were we thinking?”

Remorse and atonement take a back seat to New Age salves such as mental healing and self-worth. Judgment is replaced by psychological comfort: “deal with your trauma or your trauma will deal with you,” says a character who was once able to push a body off a cliff and cover up the deed. In the 2025 face-lifted but surgically botched version, she returns to the town to lend her “expertise” to the quest for the new butcher. It’s always been a mystery why the young people, and now their grown but hardly grown-up counterparts played by Hewitt and Prinze, revisit the scenes of their crimes, or even choose to live anywhere near them. Revisiting the site of one’s worst misdeed is never wise. Take it from Moses. In Exodus 2, when he killed an Egyptian and hid his victim’s body under the sand he had the sense to get out of town and live in exile for 40 years.

Today’s slasher film characters have become, unlike those in the classic examples of the genre such as “Night of the Living Dead” and “Halloween” mere specimens, hapless residents of a slaughterhouse whose final moments are a given. The only suspense comes from wondering what weapon will be employed to land the final blow and from what body part the blood will spill. These boys and girls are flesh without spirit, mere meat for a masked, hooded and blade-toting slasher who may be the essence of evil, the grim reaper himself, or just a maniac dressed up to look like a fisherman in drag, a perverse inversion of what fishers of men, as described in Matthew 4, are meant to be, what all of us are meant to be.

• Violence: Extreme
• Profane language: Very Heavy— • J*sus Chr*st • J*sus • Oh my G*d (multiple) • G*d d*man • My G*d • Oh G*d • G*d • Holy sh*t • D*mn • H*ll
• Vulgar/Crude language: Very Heavy— including F-words (3-4 dozen), S-words (15+), C*nt, D*ck, B*tch, B*stard, A** A**h*le • Joke about male anatomy
• Sex: Heavy— • Sexual dialog and sexual offers • Passionate heterosexual kissing • Bedroom fornication scene • Request for strangulation during sex • Lesbian kissing • Implied lesbian masturbation and oral sex, without nudity
• Drugs/Alcohol: Heavy— • Drinking whiskey, tequila, wine (frequent and excessive) • Drunkenness accompanied by very dangerous behavior • Smoking—cannabis, tobacco
• Nudity: Moderately Heavy— • Woman wears revealing clothing throughout • Party with women in revealing clothing • Women in revealing swimsuits at pool party • Partial removal of clothing during passionate sex scene, but not graphic • Woman in bra • Upper male nudity • Woman in bath (not graphic)
• Occult: Moderate— including astrology, karma, and claimed claircognizant empath
• Wokeism: Moderate

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