One year on from the massacre of I Know What You Did Last Summer, the evil fisherman is back in a futile attempt to reclaim his perch as the most terrifying hook-handed scoundrel from Candyman, Captain Hook and this guy.

Undeterred by having died at the end of the last film, Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) wins a trip to the Bahamas in a radio competition by saying the capital of Brazil is Rio de Janeiro. It isn’t, but the contest turns out to be part of the killer’s devious plan. Which makes you wonder how wrong she could have got the answer before he had to call it off. For instance if she had answered “Die Hard 9: Squirrels”, would she still have won the trip or would that have seemed too suspicious?

This is all irrelevant as the entire vacation is a conceit by the filmmakers to get Hewitt in a bikini and to have some black people to kill off, one of whom practices voodoo; exactly the kind of racist bullshit that Scream 2 called out less than one year before. Ironically though this 1998 sequel is more Scream-like than the Kevin Williamson-penned original, possessing more humour, energy and what might generously be called self-awareness, or would more accurately be called cynicism.

Where previous director Jim Gillespie deliberately avoided gratuitous gore and nudity, Danny Cannon (Judge Dredd) has no such qualms. He ups the body count and body exposure, swapping the original’s gloomy morality tale for something resembling a slasher version of Love Island. The film is best summed up by a scene in which Julie does karaoke and the words “I still know what you did last summer” appear on the display, as it crowbars Hewitt’s ill-fated singing career and the equally misguided title into one perfectly awkward moment. Before you can say, “Did they mean ‘I know what you did two summers ago’?”, everyone at the hotel is getting hooked to death, even though they have nothing to do with whatever nonsensical reason the fisherman was after Julie in the first plaice.

The movie benefits from the presence of actual horror royalty Jeffrey Combs (Re-Animator) and actual singer Brandy, along with some more interesting kills than the original, plus a tanning bed sequence eight years before Final Destination 3. But the stupidity, vacuousness and racism quickly wear as thin as the incompetent mystery elements. The only thing more obvious than the identity of the (other) killer is why a dreadlocked Jack Black had his name removed from the credits.