Hell of a Summer is an easy film to dislike. A summer camp slasher that unabashedly and quite winkingly wears the skin of its forebears without offering much in the way of formal elegance, genre reinvention, or thematic heft, and co-written and -directed by one of those now-grown Stranger Things whippersnappers, it’s a film that basically bullhorns its nepotism and vanity project roots with pride. But with such implied leg-ups and shortcuts comes some refreshing freedom from horror’s prevailing pressure to mean something or sell a high concept, and though it remains an entirely empty-headed affair at the end of the day, there’s some fun to be had with the absurdist idiosyncrasy that Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk slather all over their skeleton template of slashers past.
Hell of a Summer’s very brief setup involves Jason (Fred Hechinger) — immediately identifiable as an object of ridicule thanks to his chunky khaki shorts — returning as a counselor for his umpteenth summer, now 24 years old and starting to embarrass even his own mother with his arrested development attachment to Camp Pineway. This means that the 10 other, younger counselors who have also arrived early are bound to be even harsher in their assessment of Jason’s lingering presence at summer camp, which do leak out in assorted micro- and passive-aggressions, but they are fortunately more preoccupied with goals of partying and hooking up. And speaking of cliches, everyone here is defined by them (by design, of course): Claire (Abby Quinn) is the nice girl, a sympathetic, longtime friend to Jason and uninterested in her shallow compatriots; Bobby (Bryk) and Chris (Wolfhard) are best friends, the former your classic over-posturing teen male who just wants to get some action, while the latter has hit his moon-eyed phase of adolescence, pining for Shannon (Krista Nazaire), who is… an object of affection and little more. Then there’s Demi (Pardis Saremi) and Mike (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), the camp It couple, an aspiring influencer and the hot dummy, respectively. The remaining four are even more thinly sketched: Ezra (Matthew Finlan) is a gay theater kid, Miley (Julia Doyle) is a vegan, Noelle (Julia Lalonde) is a pagan, and Ari (Daniel Gravelle) is just kind of there, and allergic to peanuts.
Having all settled in, the group is left awaiting the belated arrival of owners John and Kathy, and Jason interprets their absence as a test of his suitability to be future heir to the Pineway throne; he even refers to himself Camp Leader during an impromptu meeting, at which point the others stop ignoring him momentarily in order to point out that this is a title he just made up. But soon, the blood-letting begins, as does the film’s governing schema wherein each character begins to get their “scene”: Bobby becomes resentful after the suggestion that hot counselors are being targeted, Noelle busts out a ouija board, etc. It’s also at this point, none too far into the film, that everyone’s characterization — or more accurately, archetype-building — is dialed up to an 11, and it becomes clear that Hell of a Summer is a comedy dressed up in horror clothes rather than a horror comedy — a perhaps pedantic observation, but an important one nonetheless, and necessary in order to bestow what measure of good will the film deserves. Sure, there’s a distinctive rubber mask donned by the assailant(s?), and some “twists,” and a whittling down of oxygen-sucking characters with kills that are appropriately squelchy when axes hit their mark and knives slip through flesh, but this is merely violent dressing for a film far more interested in delivering waggish one-liners and sending up its fatally superficial characters.
In this way, Hell of a Summer most readily recalls and is best measured next to Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies, another imperfect and playful film built around gleefully dispatching with likably loathsome young adults. Both films bear pronounced problems of slasher execution: where Reijn’s film employed a Christie-esque mode of body discovery, which sapped the film of necessary gnarliness with regard to kills and instead self-satisfying floated in the waters of its own snark, Hell of a Summer makes the mistake of exposing the guilty too early on, primarily because it fails to channel the methods of its antecedents in either establishing any existing lore that could explain the slayings or offer the suggestion that one of present parties is the killer. Instead, Jason is unconvincingly scapegoated as a madman based on no other evidence than he’s dweeb with a grown man’s beard — even though it’s quite clear to the audience that he isn’t a murderer — and absent are any dropped breadcrumbs that might suggest an alternate reading until the real madman/men/women/people are just… announced. Also like Bodies Bodies Bodies, Hell of a Summer’s humor — which is broad as a bodybuilder’s shoulders and so low-hanging that it’s touching the ground — is going to be a strictly YMMV enterprise for viewers. If you think a fight for survival wherein red solos and an empty popcorn bowl are kind of just swiped off a table in the general direction of the killer is amusing, you’re still in the game here.
Which is to say, what Hell of a Summer really has going for it is its utter disinterest in justifying its own existence. A certainly backhanded and perhaps counterintuitive compliment yes, but in a modern horror era beset as it is with smugly self-satisfied projects (looking at you again, Bodies Bodies Bodies) or self-serious trauma slogs, there’s a certain pleasure to be found in a couple of early-twenty somethings farting into the wind out of sheer affection for the genre. Hell of a Summer is undeniably dumb, poorly paced in its seeming rush to the finish line, arguably sacrilegious in its homage to camp slashers of yesteryear, and populated by characters who could have been shat out by a bad AI chatbot built by a worse AI chatbot, but it’s also blessed with a modicum of oafish charm and is a genuinely odd text in our algorithmic present. Released in April, Bryk and Wolfhard’s film doesn’t offer a hell of a spring, let alone a hell of a summer, and for some viewers it’s much more likely to just be hell. In fairness, heaven is even further away, but for those inclined toward willfully silly shenanigans or receptive to low-grade edibles, there are laughs to be had, without any of the headaches that are part and parcel to more ambitious comedy and horror failures.
DIRECTOR: Billy Bryk & Finn Wolfhard, Fred hechinger, Billy Bryk, Pardis Saremi; CAST: Finn Wolfhard; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: April 4; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 28 min.
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