By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Fred Hechinger, Abby Quinn and D’Pharaoh Woon-a-Tai
Written and directed by Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard
Neon
HELL OF A SUMMER starts with a guy playing the guitar and not quite getting it right, which turns out to be an appropriate opener. As the old saying goes, the movie knows the notes but not the music.
A combination slasher-film homage/satire and ensemble summer-camp comedy, HELL is the feature writing/directing debut of Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard, two guys who were decades from being born when the first FRIDAY THE 13TH came out and hadn’t even entered the world when SCREAM, the Cadillac of maniac-on-the-loose meta-movies, was released. That may explain why HELL OF A SUMMER feels like it’s tackling the masked-psycho genre from a distance. There’s no deconstruction here of the type that Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson perfected, or a next-level narrative like the one that made 2015’s THE FINAL GIRLS one of the best postmodern slashers. The tropes are present and accounted for, but little is done to either freshen them up or send them up.
Nor is the slashing and other violence especially adventurous either. There’s one blood-spewing ax-to-the-head gag, but for the most part the movie resists going over the top with its mayhem, either conceptually or in the execution. The closest it gets to a creative spin on killing is the villain’s use of peanut butter on someone with an allergy, and even there the effect is blunted because Byrk and Wolfhard cut away before the punchline.
They’re slightly more successful with the comedic aspects of HELL OF A SUMMER, highlighted by Fred Hechinger as protagonist Jason (his name an in-joke that has to speak for itself, since no one on screen comments on it). He’s a 24-year-old man-child heading back to woodsy Camp Pineway, the site of what passes in his life for past glories, to take part in a counselor weekend. When the place’s owners, John and Kathy, don’t show up (we know from a prologue that there’s a good, gruesome reason for this), Jason takes it upon himself to run things in their absence, and tries too hard to ingratiate himself to the other counselors, all of whom are a little younger and some of whom share his history at Pineway, even if they don’t all remember him.
Fortunately, Hechinger finds the right manner to play Jason so that he’s agreeably clueless rather than irritating, and you can see why fellow counselor Claire (Abby Quinn) finds him appealing as a potential love interest. While Quinn gives a fetching performance, however, there’s not a lot to her character as written, which is true about most of the other supporting roles. Some of them are simply types, like vegan Miley (Julia Doyle), Gothy Noelle (Julia LaLonde), influencer Demi (Pardis Saremi) and OTT theater nerd Ezra (Matthew Finlan), who plans to stage “a gritty reimagining of PINOCCHIO this year, very political,” though this mention is as far as that idea goes. Bryk and Wolfhard themselves respectively play ladies’-man-in-his-own-mind Bobby and his pal Chris, who actually gets the girl (Krista Nazaire’s Shannon) that Bobby wants. There’s some relationship drama and resentments amongst the occasional well-dropped line, but not enough here overall to really get us rooting for or against any of the characters. That holds true even when the group discover a murderer is in their midst earlier than usually happens in this kind of movie, and suspicions and accusations start flying.
HELL OF A SUMMER has been modestly but nicely crafted in the spirit of its forebears, with cinematographer Kristofer Bonnell catching some attractive images (especially toward the end) in between the horrors and composer Jay McCarrol contributing an appropriately synthesized score. It’s a signal of Bryk and Wolfhard’s clear affection for summer-camp-slaughter cinema, but after more than four decades of seminal works and variations on the theme, there needed to be more invention applied to the material, a sense of pushing boundaries or a truly fresh point of view on the genre. The devil, as another old saying goes, is in the details–only here, the Satan mask worn by the killer is just one of many elements that needed to be creepier or cleverer.
