Jason (Fred Hechinger) is called back to Camp Pineway for the summer to help serve on staff, shrugging off the chance to intern at an attorney’s office and spend those weeks instead in the great outdoors.  Excited to be back at his home away from home, he welcomes back some previous staff members; the popular pair Demi (Pardis Saremi) and Mike (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), theatre kid Ezra (Matthew Finlan), the quiet but reliable Claire (Abby Quinn), and a pair of new recruits to the staff, Chris (Finn Wolfhard) and Bobby (Billy Bryk), among others.  As the staff settles in, they soon begin to realize that John (Adam Pally) and Kathy (Rosebud Baker), the leaders of the camp, are no where to be found, and when not everyone attends to opening night bonfire, they discover that a killer is on the loose in the woods intent on picking off the staff one by one. 

Hell of a Summer is the directorial and screenwriting debut for Bryk and Wolfhard, a duo forged after both being cast in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2019).  The 88-minute film premiered at the 2023 running of the Toronto International Film Festival and was later acquired by Neon who sent the film wide on a live over 1250 screens.  Boasting a pretty wide cast of up-and-coming stars, Hell of a Summer takes its trappings from the teenage slashers of the 70s and 80s, mixed with the horn ball humor of the 90’s and 00’s, and filters it all through the experience of Gen Z. 

Hechinger leads the film as the purposefully named Jason, a returning councilor who finds himself just on the outer edge of fitting in with the rest of his crew.  In this way he can help bridge an audience who likewise may be just out of range from the rest of the cast. The R rating certaintly had something to do with it, but it was still an undeniably bold move of counterprogramming this title against A Minecraft Movie (2025) which did not pay off quite as well as imaged or hoped for by Neon as that demographic spent the weekend in the Mines with Jack Black and Jason Momoa.  Back at Pineway, however, Hechinger shines, even if his happy-go-lucky attitude gets laid on a little thick, it is a trait that the actor maintains for the length of the film.  It is a role that would be easy to overdo, especially since it is already bordering on a parody of the camp counselor, but Hechinger isolates a handful of tics and nuances to return to and exploit which makes Jason feel like a real person and not just a bumbling cartoon character. 

As for the rest of the cast, they do fill out some of the more standard and expected archetypes which is fine since they are destined to be fodder for the killer.  This is a bit of a bummer because had Wolfhard and Byrk put a little more effort into padding these characters out, audiences would have a better time connecting with them and the kills may actually have left a bit more of an impact. It is not surprising to see who in the cast gets whittled away, but even more troubling is the fact that those we are left have very little resonance with audiences.   

For a film that leans so heavily on the slasher genre, the way it handles its kills is also a real let down.  Every now and then cinematographer Kristofer Bonnell can capture a neat angle while Christine Armstrong and David Marks in the editing suite can have a little fun in the assembly – most notably in an early-on axing – but by and large the film’s kills are rather tame and its killer is uninspired, dressed in a black robe and a devil mask.  This could be forgiven had Hell of a Summer contained more humor that actually landed well or intertwined better with the kills turning them into punchlines, but many of the jokes in the film are relegated to banter between the counselors and the scriptwriting pair seems afraid to embrace the campiness of summer camp.  To be fair to the first time screenwriters, scripts that seek to blend genres are often difficult as they need to strike a balance between two sets of different sensibilities that may not always intersect, but here it does not seem like much was done to find that harmony and instead they were content to rest on the tropes instead of forge ahead. 

Hell of a Summer is still a very well made first film from the pair, and while they did face their own issues about getting the project funded and into production, there is a shocking lack of voice that is present in most first-time features.  It is because the film is not shy at all about its influences, so much so it simply becomes a messy collage of style which is most evident in Jay McCarrol’s score; a great work of John Carpenter-styled tinkering, but that familiarity just keeps reminding us of all the better films and horror icons which Byrk and Wolfhard are copying.  Hell of a Summer could work as a gateway to those classic titles, but without a sense of real identity à la Halina Reijn‘s Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), and a stubbornness about the script that refuses to engage with or examine any of the themes that would add some substance to the exceptionally thin plot such as the anxieties of young adulthood and finding our place in the world or the dangers of group think, the film struggles to leave an impression. It is an embrace of things which the pair clearly loves, and with Wolfhard’s contemporary and colleague, Millie Bobby Brown, decrying the runtime of films as the leading cause of her cinematic abstinence, Hell of a Summer should be celebrated as a sign that the younger generation does still enjoy the form, but it ends up being more an exercise in repetition which leaves us thinking that we could be much better served by returning to the masterworks of Tobe Hooper, Sean S. Cunningham, Wes Craven, or Clive Barker.