Four teenagers (Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe and Freddie Prinze Jr.) accidentally run someone over and dump his body in the ocean in this 1997 slasher they should have called Manslaughter by the Sea.

This is really the slasher genre’s last brush with mainstream success, sandwiched between Scream and Scary Movie, two films that made its tropes impossible to take semi-seriously. And writer Kevin Williamson is not looking to subvert them this time around. If Scream was his postmodern masterpiece, the only irony in I Know What You Did Last Summer is that its writer accidentally killed the slasher movie the previous year, and the formulaic follow-up will forever sit in its shadow.

There’s no doubt though that Williamson (who was writing Dawson’s Creek around the same time) is fluent in ’90s teen culture, and successfully updates his ’80s horror influences for a young, modern audience. These include slasher flicks like Prom Night and The House on Sorority Row, as well as the urban legend of “The Hook” and the 1973 novel on which the film is based. It has better production values and performances (from teen TV stars no less) than the ’80s slashers that inspired it, but none of the scuzzy weirdness or inventive kills, diluted into a commercially friendly 15-rated package that’s as glossy as the cast’s ’90s hairdos.

Of course director Jim Gillespie is no Wes Craven, but the movie also suffers from lack of variety thanks to the killer using a hook for every bloodless murder. And it is hard to care about the deeply uncharismatic characters (with the notable exception of Sarah Michelle Gellar), not least because they decide against telling the police they ran someone over on the basis that “it’s manslaughter, we’re gonna fry no matter who takes the fall.” Which would be an unlikely misunderstanding of the death penalty even if one of them wasn’t an aspiring lawyer. Also, rich white kids being charged for a drunken hit-and-run? Talk about an urban legend.

I Know What You Did Last Summer swerves all these chances for satire, leaving a slick and fleeting impression that you won’t remember in a week, let alone next summer.