HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: SUMMER OF 84 (2018) * ½

Summer of 84 is Stranger Things meets Rear Window meets The ‘Burbs.  It’s a throwback to the days where kids rode bicycles throughout their neighborhoods instead of being constantly on their phone, used nudie books as masturbatory material instead of the internet, read the Weekly World News to get their paranoia fix instead of clickbait bullshit, and relied on milk cartons as lost children bulletins instead of Amber alerts.  It was also a time when serial killers worked their way into the national consciousness. 

That’s just a fancy way of introducing the plot.  Four dorky teenage friends suspect their neighbor of being a serial killer.  Well, that’s about it as far as the plot is concerned.  

Summer of 84 comes from the directing trio of Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell.  Their previous film, Turbo Kid was a pastiche of various movies, but it was a fun pastiche, filled with lots of energy, invention, and spirit.  This is just a pastiche. 

The film lumbers from predictable scene to predictable scene without any tension, drama, or momentum.  At all times it feels like an outline for a movie than the finished product.  Like the filmmakers told themselves they’d go back and fill in things like character development (the kids are all paper-thin stereotypes), red herrings (there is only one suspect and it’s obvious from the start he did it), and legitimate scares later on, but they somehow never got around to it.  

Which is weird, because it’s 108 minutes long, and yet, it feels like nothing ever happens.  It’s long on running time and short on substance.  I mean it seemingly just goes on forever.  Just when you think it’s over, it plods on for another twenty minutes.  Not only that, but it gets needlessly uglier as it goes along, and the finale is sure to leave a bad taste in your mouth.   

This is one summer to forget.