Quick synopsis: Five friends cause a death and decide to lie about it.

For whatever reason, this is the only ’90s teen slasher franchise I have no history with. I’ve even watched the first two Urban Legends, and I’m fairly certain that more people are in those films than have actually watched them. I’m aware of what happens, so I wasn’t lost when watching IKWYDLS (eye-cue-ya-doo-les), I got the references and recurring characters. Some of the references were so heavily signposted that I’m pretty sure babies born during the pre-movie trailers would understand they were callbacks. The “what are you waiting for?” callback is particularly obvious; the character would not say that at that moment, and only does so because it was accidentally iconic in the original. The fact that she repeats it here makes it seem like she actually says it all the time, and it just happened that one of those times was during the events of the first movie.

Wow. I thought I’d hold out longer before saying how much I disliked this movie. If it came out in 2017, I might have enjoyed it more. But the release of the new Scream and Halloween movies means this suffers by comparison. They are the most unfortunate franchises to be compared to, because they both excelled at what this movie fails at: displaying societal trauma. They both did a great job at showing how towns cope with being the site of a horrific event.

IKWYDLS tries to excuse that by saying “rich person covered it up” (which turns into a motive for one of the killers), but that doesn’t wash, for multiple reasons. One, there’s a podcast about the murders, so it’s not THAT covered up. Two, and it’s the same problem I had with Five Nights At Freddy’s; if a group of people were murdered horrifically by a serial killer, the town would not forget about it. If someone said, “Don’t talk about those murders”, people would assume the person saying it had something to do with it. Legends aren’t fire, they don’t die without the oxygen of publicity; they grow. They’d be new falsehoods attached to it “I heard the killer came back years later as a zombie, and for some reason, despite being a fisherman, killed people in a completely landlocked state”. Fuck, that third movie was so stupid.

It’s not just on an “if you think about it for a while” level that the script has issues. There are some serious tonal issues. Nowhere is this more evident than in the final scene. Two of the surviving characters talk about how one of the killers is still alive. But they do it in such a casual way that it has no impact. I think that may have been because the writers were attempting to make the teen characters cool and quippy, but it just makes them seem like they’re not taking the situation seriously. The characters are far, far too quippy, unnaturally so. The comments don’t even make sense. “None of this would have happened if men went to therapy” is an especially stupid line in a movie where one of the killers is female. Did the writers forget the villain reveal?

Maybe I’d be more forgiving of the quippy nature of the script if the characters weren’t so, so, soooooo annoying. It’s not even “learn to despise these characters”, they’re instantly annoying. They come off as the type of people who would respond to a global pandemic by singing a John Lennon cover, and while I’m somewhat glad to end that joke there, I don’t think Gal Gadot’s lawyers would be, as my planned next sentence would have been an easy libel win for them.

The thing is, I’m fairly sure we’re supposed to like this group of characters. The inciting incident is a lot less blameless than the original. There’s no chance of them being legally culpable; it’s built up to make them as innocent as possible. Although now I’ve just realised something. One of the killers is someone who was very close to the person who died in the original accident. Would the gang not have noticed that in any of the newspaper pictures after the event? Damn, this movie gets dumber the longer I think about it.

It’s not all negative; there are some fun kills. The death of Wyatt is brutal and brilliant. The character arc of Teddy is pretty interesting, and they really could have done more with it. Sarah Pidgeon gives a truly great and sympathetic performance. The use of Julie James from the first two is the perfect use of her. The way they use Ray is……inconsistent. I don’t hate the character, I’m not a Ray-cist, but his character does feel wasted at times.

In summary, actually, do I need to summarise? You can tell I didn’t like this movie. It’s not among the worst 5 films of the year, but it’s possibly in the worst 10. Still, it’s better than the third one (no, haven’t seen it, but I’m still aware of its shitness).