I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
Amazon Prime
KUDOS to the writer and executive producer of the new I Know What You Did Last Summer TV series, Sara Goodman (Gossip Girl), that she didn't simply reboot the classic 1997 film.
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It wouldn't be awfully original, but there's no doubt a hooded figure hunting screaming teens with a fish hook would still resonate in 2021.
Naturally due to be expanded narrative over eight 50-minute episodes I Know What You Did Last Summer aspires to be more psychological than the original and explores with greater detail the backstory of the characters. That's the aim, but it's hardly successful.
The original film's plot was simple. Four teenagers are terrorised by a hooded figure a year after they run over and seemingly kill a man one night after their graduation party.
The TV reboot attempts complicate the story, and in turn, the plot becomes nonsensical.
The story begins with two identical twin sisters, Alison and Lennon, living in Hawaii both played by Madison Iseman (Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle). Alison is intelligent, sweet and a virgin, while Lennon is manipulative, promiscuous and uses drugs. Yes, it's all very binary.
After Lennon sleeps with Alison's boyfriend the sisters fall out and each storm out of the party. A group of friends jump in a car with Alison, believing she's Lennon.
They crash into Lennon, killing her (although everyone thinks it's Alison) and dump her body. Only Alison's father is told the truth that is was Lennon who died and he bizarrely takes the news calmly, despite his daughter dumping his other child's body in an ocean cave.
A year later Alison returns to Hawaii from college and pretends to be Lennon when she starts receives frightening texts and finds a severed goat's head in her cupboard.
Beside the ludicrous twins storyline, the show also suffers from having no likable or charismatic characters. There's no Jennifer Love Hewitt or Sarah Michelle Gellar here.
By the time the killer shows up you're practically willing them to frighten them out of their social media-obsessed lives.
BAD SPORT
Netflix
THE beauty of Netflix documentary series like The Movies At Made Us or This Is Pop is the episodes are divided into specific topics or persons of interest, allowing you to pick and choose.
Bad Sport is another, focusing on infamous stories of when elite sportspeople have been caught in the dangerous web of crime.
The six-part series focuses on instances of match-fixing in Arizona basketball and the manipulation of referees in Italian football, among others. Cricket lovers will be naturally drawn to the tragic downfall of late South African captain turned match-fixer, Hansie Cronje.
Bad Sport brings together major players in Cronje's life, including his wife, siblings, and the bookmaker who instigated his demise.
Bad Sport provides a fairly rose-coloured portrait of Cronje, a man who led South Africa post-Apartheid and helped bridge the relationship between blacks and whites. He is often described in the doco as the second-most highly-regarded person in the Rainbow Nation after Nelson Mandela.
It feels like a stretch. However, it does reveal how easily a seemingly good person can be corrupted by their greed for money.