Since 2019 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of movies that were released back in 1984, I’ve been writing a lot about the cinematic highlights (and lowlights) of that year lately, with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Conan the Destroyer being just two of those reviews (with more to come). Maybe it’s because I’ve been writing about so many 1984 movies, but I recently took note of a film called Summer of ’84. Released in 2018, but taking place back during the summer of Gremlins, and Ghostbusters, Summer of ’84 tries to be a nostalgic look at a bygone era that’s told through the eyes of a group of teens--one of whom thinks there may be a serial killer living in his area.
Davey Armstrong (Graham Verchere) begins to suspect that Mr. Mackey (Rich Sommer) his neighbor, who’s also a local cop, might be the serial killer that he’s been hearing about when he spots some suspicious things going on. Davey believes he briefly saw one of the missing boys through a window inside Mackey’s house, and Mackey has been buying a great deal of dirt, which he seems to be using to bury things in his back yard in spaces that are grave-sized. So Davey recruits his life-long buddies to help him to investigate, and we’re off on another ride of the Monster Squad!
At least, that’s what the advertising for Summer of ’84 would have you believe, that this is a fun mishmash of Monster Squad and Stranger Things all rolled into one; a nostalgic romp with a bunch of kids through a past era while they’re fighting monsters--only this time, the monster is an all too human serial killer (which is no less dangerous). The problem with Summer of ‘84 is that it’s trying to be more of a somber and serious story, like Stand By Me, but it comes nowhere near the complexity of director Rob Reiner’s masterpiece because the main characters of Summer of ’84 are too flat, and one-note.
I couldn’t bring myself to care about these kids who’re off on this dopey, misbegotten Hardy Boys mission because their characters are not very well-developed; they’re too shallow for the viewer to really care about--as opposed to the main characters from Stranger Things, who I feel I know very well, thanks to the better and far more sophisticated writing on that series. And because I wasn’t allowed to make a proper investment in the characters from the start, watching Summer of ’84 became a slow-paced and very tedious experience for me, right up to and including its “shocking” ending.
I could see the basic message that the directors (all three of them) were trying to make with this film: that life is far more complex, unfair, and scarier than the ‘gee-whiz’ adventures that the Hardy Boys stories depict. I just wish that they had a better script, as well as having created, and maintained, the proper tone throughout the film. But their film starts out as this goofy popcorn film in which the characters are about as well fleshed out as a typical cartoonish eighties kids film, only to make a hard, and unwanted, turn into Silence of the Lambs territory at the end.
As a result, Summer of ‘84 is basically The Goonies Meets John Wayne Gacey (ick!)--whether the directors intended this or not, that was basically what we got, and because of its weak script and crazy shifts in tone (not to mention that the techno-pop music is so bad, it’s atrocious--and a large chunk of the film takes place in total darkness, thanks to inept cinematography), the movie winds up being an overly dismal waste of time that should just be avoided at all costs. --SF
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