It’s official — the ’90s are so back that they’ve actually come full circle to becoming dated again. “I Know What You Did Last Summer” follows in the footsteps of “Scream” in getting itself a splashy Gen Z makeover. But unlike “Scream,” whose meta sense of humor made it a perfect fit for a new generation of viewers, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” loses a lot of its sparkle when taken out of its very specific moment in ’90s horror. Leaning heavily on a nostalgia factor that is unlikely to resonate with its target demographic, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” is a lazy retread of an already mediocre horror film, with only brief flashes of promise peppered between kills.

Late at night on July 4th, a group of friends (Chase Sui Wonders, Madelyn Cline, Jonah Hauer-King, Sarah Pidgeon, and Tyriq Withers) are driving when they accidentally cause an accident, sending an innocent driver careening over the edge of a cliff to their death. Terrified of what will happen if anyone finds out about their involvement, the group makes a pact not to tell anyone about what occurred that night. But one year later, as the group is reunited at Danica’s (Cline) bridal shower, they are stunned when Danica receives a disturbing note within her pile of gifts that says — you guessed it — “I know what you did last summer.”

In fairly short order, they have to contend with a mysterious figure out for revenge, clad in a fisherman’s outfit and wielding a gruesome-looking hook. Will they end up paying the ultimate price for last summer’s misdeeds, or will they find a way to escape the killer’s clutches?

Right off the bat, it’s clear that whatever magic formula the original film had that won over audiences is missing from this version. Perhaps the 1997 film was appealing just because of the cast of rising stars it had assembled, each at the peak of their ’90s powers. Whatever the X factor, there’s something lacking in this new crew of stars, whether it’s their performances or the fact that their characters are so thinly written it’s almost as though the writers forgot that we are, at the end of the day, supposed to care about these people. It’s a complete mystery what Jonah Hauer-King is even doing here — we would have thought he was well past the point of playing arguably the most underdeveloped character in an ensemble horror. All of the crew has few defining characteristics, making it difficult for audiences to become emotionally invested in them. Madelyn Cline as Danica is a clear standout, as the only one who manages to inject much personality into their performance.

Perhaps part of the reason for this is that “I Know What You Did Last Summer” seems extremely attached to the past. Rather than fully allowing the new young cast to take over the spotlight, it insists on bringing back legacy characters and giving them an outsized role in the narrative. It’s not that we aren’t happy to see Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt, but they take up way too much oxygen in this production, bringing everything to a grinding halt so they can deliver one-liners designed to elicit cheers from the few original “I Know What You Did Last Summer” megafans in the audience. In general, the film seems to fundamentally misjudge the level of affection viewers have for the original movie. There’s only one cameo in the film that really works, and we’re not going to spoil it here.

If you’re not going to win audiences over with your main cast of characters in a horror movie, you really need to sell the murder scenes. After all, gore and inventive deaths are what traditionally put butts in seats for a slasher. Here, too, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” feels half-hearted. There are a couple of sequences that have a little bit of spirit to them, but for the most part, the deaths in this film are either knock-offs of other, better slasher murders, or they’re so short that they barely have a chance to build up any tension before they’re over. As much as people like to write off slashers as schlocky and not requiring much cinematic prowess to execute, there’s an art to making an agonizingly tense death scene with the perfect gruesome payoff, and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” only occasionally touches on it. Other characters are dispatched in seconds flat, and not to sound like a creep, but that’s just not as satisfying.

“I Know What You Did Last Summer” exhibits some signs of life that prevent it from being a total disaster. Sometimes the interactions within the group are genuinely funny, especially when Madelyn Cline as Danica is taking the lead. The film touches on issues of class in a community that has rebuilt itself from a struggling fishing town that was once the site of a violent massacre into a tourist hotspot, and the accompanying change of financial status that makes Southport’s leaders reluctant to take the string of murders seriously. But this dynamic isn’t fully explored, presumably to make more room for the ill-judged use of legacy characters. As a reboot/sequel (it is strangely both at once), it fails to make an impact, largely because it doesn’t have enough confidence in its new characters to allow them to fully own the major narrative arc.

“I Know What You Did Last Summer” hits theaters on July 18. But before you head to the movies, check out Looper’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer” recap video.