Hell of a Summer Review

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24-year-old Jason (Fred Hechinger) just can’t let go of summer camp. His mother pleads with him to get a real job, but Jason is determined to spend one last summer at Camp Pineway. After all, the co-owners of the camp invited him back for another year.

He arrives at the camp, but discovers that the owners are mysteriously absent. He meets the other counselors, including his love interest Claire (Abby Quinn), ladies’ man Chris (Finn Wolfhard), who is pursuing Shannon (Krista Nazaire), and Chris’s neurotic friend, Bobby (Billy Byrk).

Jason struggles to connect with his younger coworkers, but a much larger problem is looming. A mysterious figure in a devil mask is lurking in the woods, and he’s planning to hack and chop his way through everyone at the camp. After a body is found, the younger counselors quickly turn on Jason, believing that he is the culprit.

Hell of a Summer has a decent amount of violence and gore, but it’s much more of a comedy than a horror movie. There’s some funny dialogue and character-based humor. As for scares, there aren’t any. Seriously folks, there are episodes of Sesame Street that are scarier than this movie.

Hell of a Summer is like the movie equivalent of a car assembled from spare parts of other vehicles. There’s some Friday the 13th, a little bit of Scream, a dash of April Fool’s Day, and lots of retro summer camp comedies like Meatballs. The script does have a couple of twists, but there’s nothing that hasn’t been done before in this genre.

It’s flawed, but Hell of a Summer is respectable effort when you consider the youth and inexperience of its co-directors. Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk are in the early twenties. Neither had directed a feature film before.

They understand how to make a movie on a technical level. The acting, writing, and production values are all competent, and the film appears more expensive than its $1 million budget.

These guys are clearly fans of retro slasher movies, but what’s missing here is any kind of tension. Even comedic horror movies should have *some* suspense. This is more like a comedy that happens to include a few murders.

This is going to be a short review, because I don’t have that much to say about this movie. It’s fine, but not memorable. That said, it’ll be interesting see what Wolfhard and Byrk make in the future, now that they’ve gained the experience of making a movie.