Hell of a Summer is a horror/comedy camp slasher movie… and when you can’t tell what tone the comedy is going for – or if some of the jokes are even intentional – then you’re gonna have a bad time. And I had a bad time.

It’s about a group of councilors who show up to camp before the kids. Eventually – eventually – a boring masked killer starts picking people off. Which sounds super generic because it is… but it’s also a satire of that scenario. I’m just not sure how much so.

It isn’t a particularly scary movie so it has to live and die on the comedy and the characters. And neither worked for me. The comedy kept bouncing back and forth between a general camp comedy and a slasher satire. Its tonal whiplash left me wondering if it was even a slasher film in the first place.

It kept hinting at scary scenes and then pulling a fast one to the point where I was wondering if it was just a camp comedy pretending to be a slasher. But, no, eventually (eventually!) a killer in a very boring mask shows up. It just isn’t an interesting enough slasher for me to care. I feel like we’ve seen these motivations before in better films.

As far as the characters go, I kind of liked one or two of them. The main dude – “cleverly” named Jason – bugged me in a way that he was supposed to bug me. But it didn’t endear him… he made me want him to die. I liked the girl who seemed interested in him… though that’s partly because he was such a loser and she kept trying to make it work.

Finn Wolfhard does double duty on writing and directing… and I like the guy so I’m unhappy to say his first film didn’t work. Nor was he much in it which is to his credit for giving the main character duty to others.

So… yeah… if the humor doesn’t hit, then there’s not much left to this film. It’s not a particularly interesting slasher and the characters aren’t particularly interesting either.

I like the story behind the production and distribution of the flick more than anything actually in it.

Score: 68