Eight years after I Know What You Did Last Summer, the fisherman killer has passed into folklore, described in hushed tones as “like Jack the Ripper except he never got caught” (surely the dumbest line in the film). As a hilarious prank, some teenagers buy “the real hook from the legend” (ok I take that back) and use it to dress up as the fisherman, chase their friend and have him skateboard off a roof, only to find that someone has moved the crash mats. And replaced them with a deadly tractor. One year later, Amber (Brooke Nevin) receives 50 text messages saying “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”

This straight-to-DVD threequel (ironically made by a company called Original Film) reuses the 1997 movie‘s story, but without the budget or cast of the star-filled original, making it the opposite of a glossy remake. The initial director was reportedly fired just two weeks before shooting was due to start, so Sylvain White (Slender Man) was brought in at the last minute. That rushed schedule lends the film a visible cheapness (including one of cinema’s most obvious mannequin corpses), but also a much-needed scuzziness and hazy ’80s aesthetic missing from the commercially coddled series so far.

In fact the only indications that this is actually 2006 are the use of mobile phones and the fact one of the characters (Torrey DeVitto) is in a nu-metal band. One particularly baffling plot point means she has to perform a concert literally mid-chase. And it’s still more convincing than Jennifer Love Hewitt’s musical contributions to I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.

It makes more sense this time that the characters wouldn’t want to tell the cops about their involvement in the inciting manslaughter, although one has to question the legitimacy of a police department that can’t detect a prank by local teenagers. The movie relocates the story to rural Colorado so that the characters are constantly surrounded by farming equipment. White embraces the ’80s slasher school of grizzly kills, but is unfortunately hooked on the modern technique of accompanying every jump-scare with a loud non-diegetic noise – even when the scare is loud music coming on the radio.

The relocation to Colorado leaves the movie conceptually muddled, with the fisherman skulking around a ski lodge, appearing either very lost or confused about the type of skate that was involved. The film is also confused between its mystery and supernatural elements, still angling for a whodunnit over the killer’s identity, only for him to turn out to be (spoiler alert) the evil spirit of the dead fisherman from the previous films. So why was he texting? More importantly why were we denied the scene where he clobbers out 50 identical text messages with his hook-hand? And why does he care about these unrelated Colorado characters? Does he target every teenager in America who has accidentally killed someone and kept it a secret? That seems a niche M.O. for a serial killer, even an undead one.

For all its faults, I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer is the most fun of the trilogy; an ’80s remake of a ’90s movie held together by glue, fake blood and nu-metal. The previous instalments seemed embarrassed to be slasher flicks. This one isn’t embarrassed enough.