Movie Review: SUMMER OF '84 (2018)

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*sighs*

I really had to mull over this one, because I was left with a really bad taste in my mouth when it ended, and its taken me a while to form a verdict. And that verdict isn't a favorable one.

Set in the area around Cape May in New Jersey, SUMMER OF '84 is, predictably enough, awash in 80's tropes. You know, like so much these days, from THE GOLDBERGS to STRANGER THINGS, be prepared to take a dip in the shallow end of the trope-pool. They are most definitely present, and yet it doesn't really evoke the feeling of living in the mid-80's. STRANGER THINGS, for all of its fudging of its 80's setting, does a much better job of summoning up that nostalgia and that atmosphere than SUMMER manages to evoke. Worse, the film really fails to subvert any of the tropes, and just gives you things like boys on bikes in the summertime, each of them occupying archetype slots that hearken to films like THE BREAKFAST CLUB, as they hang out in their Frog-Brothers tree-house. Meh.

Its competently shot, competently acted, but rather bland, and its pace is far too leisurely. It offers up a mystery in the form of a serial-killer called "The Cape-May Slayer", and yet the answer to that mystery becomes quite obvious early-on, which is as big a mistake as a film like this can make.

You get your boys riding their bikes, trying to suss out the identity of the serial-killer who's identity is blatantly obvious, you get a pretty-girl character, Nikki (played by RIVERDALE's Tiera Skovbye), who is around 3 years older than our quartet of boys, and an object of their juvenile lust. There's a sequence where she goes to see our main character, Davey, that had me asking the whole time "Is this a dream? This has to be a fucking dream", and yet no, it wasn't a dream at all. If she had gotten sexy with Davey I'd have probably stopped watching at that point, but it doesn't go that far. Even so, it was pretty out there.

Later, in the final-act, you get a resolution to the identity of the killer...and then the film snaps ALL suspension of disbelief with a cynical, downer of an ending that amounts to a mean-spirited pile of bullshit, and at that point, the film completely lost me. Sure, you could take a more thematic look at the film and approach it as a metaphor for the harsh realities of growing up, but the film is just too flawed for that charitable sort of analysis.

SUMMER OF '84 has scored reasonably well on Rotten Tomatoes, and has been reviewed well by Film Threat and Bloody Disgusting, and I can understand the why of it, I just completely disagree. Variety, oddly enough, came to similar conclusions as mine, saying "neither funny nor scary enough to leave a lasting impression". Amen, Variety, amen.

Anyway, your mileage may vary WILDLY on this film, so I don't want to suggest that you avoid it. Hopefully, you'll like it better than I did.

Two-and-a-half stars. **1/2

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