About midway through the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, survivor of past hook-handed murder sprees and former teen with a guilty conscious Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.) responds to a new rash of deaths in his coastal hometown: “There’s a lot of similarities to 1997.” Well, yeah. We all know why we’re here, and why a now gray-bearded Prinze is once more playing Ray in this kinda sequel to/kinda reboot of the first I Know What You Did Last Summer: To see if there are any new frights (and any lingering goodwill) to be squeezed from a slasherfied take on Lois Duncan’s YA bestseller about the consequences of covering up vehicular manslaughter. And while Ray is right – this movie does share a lot of similarities with its predecessor – it’s not quite enough to make it a horror classic on its own.

The cast is a cross-generational mix of notable up-and-comers (Outer Banks’ Madelyn Cline, The Studio’s Chase Sui Wonders) and returning favorites (Prinze, Jennifer Love Hewitt ), but the plot is more or less the same: An unknown assailant starts picking off a group of young adults one by one a year after they hid their involvement in a violent death. Normally, the identity of the killer – fashioned after a one-handed urban-legend boogeyman who’s haunted amorous youngsters for decades – would be I Know What You Did Last Summer’s central mystery. But co-writers Sam Lansky and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (the latter pulling double duty as director) barely have any time for that, convinced as they are that their movie must tie all of its threads back to the Southport massacre of ’97 film whether it truly makes sense to do so or not. The things that happen in I Know What You Did Last Summer happen because something must continuously move the plot forward, not due to any sense of internal logic.

Even the fun nods to the modern day, meant to set this movie somewhat apart from its predecessor, feel ho-hum. Characters reference a couple of online memes. Model/musician Gabbriette shows up as the host of a murder podcast. Hewitt’s recovering final girl Julie James is saddled with defining “trauma” in a scene that, assuming it hasn’t made your eyes roll right out of their sockets, could be read as a parody of Jamie Lee Curtis’ press tour for 2018’s Halloween.

That said, every now and then there are moments of true inspiration that pop amid the overriding paint-by-numbers feeling. Many of them involve Cline, who capably inherits the mantle of I Know What You Did Last Summer prom queen from Sarah Michelle Gellar. An early scene gives us the memorable image of her character soaking in a bathtub with a blood-red bath bomb, and one dream sequence involving another beloved character had me howling in the theater.

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