Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Finn Wolfhard, Billy Bryk
Starring: Fred Hechinger, Abby Quinn, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Billy Bryk, Finn Wolfhard, Pardis Saremi, Rosebud Baker, Adam Pally
Young actors Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk, who became buddies on the set of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, have teamed up to make their debuts as writer/directors with Hell of a Summer. It's a throwback to a sub-genre - the summer camp slasher - that peaked well before either Wolfhard or Bryk were born. It's as much a summer camp comedy as a slasher, though it has little in common with its '80s antecedents. Absent are both the horniness of Meatballs and the gore of Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp. Hell of a Summer's chief problem is that it's trying to remake the sort of movies that simply couldn't get made today for a prudish and easily offended Gen-Z audience.
Wolfhard and Bryk cast themselves in supporting parts with the lead role going to rising star Fred Hechinger. He plays Jason (get it?), a 24-year-old who seems determined to delay entering adulthood by returning to his job as counsellor at Camp Pineway for yet another summer. Jason claims he was personally asked to return by the camp's owners, John and Kathy. What he doesn't know is that John and Kathy were butchered by a masked killer the night before the counsellors arrive.
Those counsellors are a collection of teen movie stereotypes, some slightly more developed than others. Some are very modern, like the camp theatre kid, the vegan and the influencer, while others are relics of the '80s, the jocks, goths and nerds. They're all pretty much coded as assholes, save for Claire (Abby Quinn), the only one who doesn't belittle Jason, and who just might be a potential love interest for the goofball.
That night the killer returns, and it's Jason who is the first to find the bodies. This leads to Jason being viewed with suspicion to the point where the other counsellors, save for Claire, turn on him, leaving Jason to contend with surviving both the killer and his turncoat cohorts.
The idea of a bunch of "cool kids" turning on a socially awkward loner has been explored in several slasher movies, but the idea of playing this setup as comedy is rather novel. Unfortunately Wolfhard and Bryk fail to exploit the potential of this premise. Hell of a Summer should play like a cousin of Eli Craig's horror-comedy Tucker & Dale vs Evil, in which a pair of rednecks are mistaken for killers by a bunch of prejudiced city slickers, but it has none of the smart humour of Craig's film. Save for Jason and Claire, the counsellors are such an unlikeable lot that we'd gladly cheer on their bloody demises if Jason was forced to violently defend himself against them.
Horror fans will feel cheated by how tame Hell of a Summer is when it comes to its kills. Most of the murders occur offscreen, but they're unimaginative anyway, save for a bit where a jar of peanut butter is weaponised against a teen with a nut allergy. It doesn't help that the film's night scenes (i.e. the bulk of the movie) are so dimly lit that we wouldn't be able to see the kills if they played out on screen.
I'm not suggesting that you need to have grown up in a certain era if you wish to pay homage to its films, but while Wolfhard and Bryk are probably fans of '80s slashers, their lack of filmmaking experience is all too apparent here. They're using a five decades old template to satirise today's youth, but they display little understanding of the sleazy appeal of classic slashers, and they have nothing to say about their contemporaries that we haven't seen before.
Hell of a Summer is on UK/ROI VOD from July 7th.
