I am feeling fine overall, but I have a growing restlessness inside me. I have not made the progress I wanted in planning, and I’m not any closer to finding a space to sell my zine. I have been reminded what the word “collate” means as I printed out twenty copies of it, uncollated. I’m just, like…between projects, you forget how you spend your time, you know? I have started a document to draft dialogue for my next story, so I’m making progress. I like to plan scenes knowing what the characters are saying, because I want the body language and stuff to match up exactly. With this, I’ll post a photo of a couple draft images of a new hairstyle for Kierra. I wanted to simplify the last one she had so it would be easier to draw and understand. This one also gives me some flexibility in the way it flows around her as she moves.
All this, of course, brings me to this week’s topic: An analysis of a movie you did not see, and will not see, Hell of a Summer. I saw it last week because it was on at a good time of day. It’s a horror-comedy about a group of camp counselors at a summer camp, Camp Pineway, being attacked by a serial killer while setting up for the summer. The main character is Jason, the oldest counselor there at 24-year-old, whose love for the camp is holding him in place as his adulthood is coming for him. Overall, the movie is mediocre. There’s fun stuff going on, but none of it is used effectively, and it’s so easy to see what this movie could have and should have been.
Right off the bat, you probably noticed that the situation is exactly like Friday the 13th. It’s also similar to Scream in being somewhat comedic, having an opening scene in which the killer kills, and in that the killer is one of the counselors. I don’t feel bad saying that last part from a spoiler perspective, because it’s in the description of the movie. Hell of a Summer doesn’t make use of those comparisons in any way, to its detriment. I get wanting to be your own thing, but they’re cribbing so much from two other prominent horror series that it’s silly to forge your own identity with the remaining 15% of space. Scream the 13th would have been a great pitch for a movie. I’ll get more into the details later. Friday the Scream?
The movie has a lot of issues with giving shallow outlines of what you expect or want without actually showing you who anyone is or what the story is about. Jason is the chief example because he’s the most fleshed out character by far. The description of the movie says he’s a social outcast because he’s the oldest counselor. While the rest of the crew makes fun of his age a few times, and I do acknowledge how he could be on the outs even with the narrow age gap, the film doesn’t really argue that his age is what’s keeping him apart. He’s also a pathetic try-hard who clearly loves camp way too much and forces himself onto the others socially because he’s too insecure to make friends. There’s a lot going on with him that could make for an interesting, relatable character if, you know, we knew why he loved camp so much, and why he’s so attached to it, to the point of wanting to run the camp instead of becoming a lawyer. That’s part of his deal, by the way; he gave up an opportunity for a summer internship at a law firm to be a counselor. It’s implied that the rest of his life must be sad and lonely and terrible, and that’s why he loves going off to this other world where everything is good. But also he’s got an offer from a prestigious law firm that could become a successful career? Also, we never see camp. He’s been going to camp since he was a child, has been a counselor for six years, and has gotten camp champion runner-up for eight years, presumably spending a lot of time with all these other counselors. Yet he also is on the outs with everyone, no one knows any details of his life, and based on the vibes, you expect he was bullied and excluded all summer every year. Why does he love camp again? Why give up your chance to be a lawyer? What’s his deal, exactly? Like I said, I could accept that his age gap, even if it’s narrow, keeps him apart, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s known all of them for a decade. It’s messy and confusing when you start piecing together his life. By the end of the movie, he’s decided it’s time to move past camp and grow up, but the movie doesn’t make a strong case for that. He could just as easily have decided to remake the camp so it can be a good place for kids even after tragedy, in honor of his fallen counselors. There’s no actual “I have to grow up” moment, he’s just placed at the end of what his arc should have been.
The other counselors are another issue. They’re all one-dimensional teen movie stereotypes, except for two. I’m not saying Claire and Shannon are fuller characters, just that they’re not obvious teen movie stereotypes, at least that I recognized. Anyway, they’re camp counselors, right? They’ve all been to Pineway for years, but you would be forgiven if you thought none of them had met each other before or that they randomly applied for a job. There’s smatterings in a couple places about them having a history, but there’s no interest in establishing that history, exploring it, or using it. I would have expected, just based on the “Jason is on the outs for being older than these teens” thing, that they all get along and have a clique of some kind, but they don’t. None of them want to be there, really, and none of them seem to particularly like Pineway or the idea of summer camp. It’s kind of confusing to think about why you’d bother making a movie like that. Unlike Friday the 13th, this isn’t the first time the camp has been reopened in years; they all saw each other as counselors or fellow campers just last year. Camp counselor isn’t a standard job that a teen would be forced to do by circumstance; you choose to do it because you genuinely like camp and want to spend your time guiding a bunch of middle and high schoolers through swimming races and arts and crafts. The lack of enthusiasm or shared identity as campers is baffling and an obvious series of missed opportunities. I mean, given that they’re all part of different social scenes, it’s not even clear why they’re friends, to the extent any of them are.
That brings us to one of the major issues with this film: The lack of balance between comedy and horror. I can go on a whole thing about how American culture fails on most fronts to recognize something can be both silly and cool, funny and terrifying, for the same reason, rather than in exclusion to each other. This movie does a lot of that. A horror-comedy has to be both funny and scary. Baseline, I expect to laugh and care whether anyone makes it out alive and/or how they defeat the killer/monster. After all, I expect that most, if not all, the characters in a horror movie will die – it’s a given – so the real trick is getting me to care, which could lead to fear. One of these counselors dying has the weight of seeing the one table that’s painted differently than the background break in Tom and Jerry. So clearly they mean it’s a horror movie in the sense that there will be some (but not nearly enough) gore.
In that case, it’s also not very funny. I did laugh a few times, but most of the humor is about beating up on Jason or making fun of these shallow, decades-old stereotypes. Miley is a hypocritical, judgmental vegan who’s just so much better than you because she doesn’t eat meat. And tofu, a very old and fully distinct kind of food that was co-opted by Western vegetarianism as a meat alternative, is gross and silly for its New Age novelty, amiright? Ari is a self-important wannabe screenwriter who compares the horrors his war movie characters face to his peanut allergy. On its own, that joke works, but then they keep bringing up his allergy, like his thing isn’t being a self-important wannabe screenwriter. How old is this movie, that we’re still making jokes about kids being soft for having a common and, factually, deadly food allergy? A thing I remember people doing in the past, for some unfathomable reason, and weird old people still do today. Jason gets beaten up on a lot for being pathetic, and the counselors eventually accuse him of being the killer because they assume he’s so sad he snapped. That’s a huge part of the movie and carries a lot of narrative water, but also it’s a joke, right? I can’t imagine wanting to torture and kill someone for being sad, and just completely let that go and act normal when I’m convinced I was wrong. There’s no attempt to acknowledge how insane that is or hold anyone to account at the end. Claire tries to convince Jason not to forgive them for it, and it’s not clear why he’s so ready to, and it’s just kind of weird. When it first comes up, you can go along with it for a second, but it’s so sustained and serious a thing in their heads that you expect someone apologizes to Jason, and they never do.
Finally, there’s the dual problem at the end of the movie. Jason has a heroic turn at the end when he chooses to go back and try to save everyone because there’s no help coming. Claire reminds him that he owes them nothing and they treated him terribly, but he still goes. The lack of balance between the comedy and horror makes this dramatic moment feel weak. He also doesn’t get to be heroic, really. So, just like Scream, there’s a pair of killers, even though there’s no reason for two in this case. The killers faked their deaths at the beginning so no one would question their absence, but then also reappear later, on purpose, but Jason being accused of being the killer ruins their plans for fame, right? Don’t think too hard about it, the writers didn’t. So Jason runs into one of them, is surprised and happy to see him alive, and then gets captured. He doesn’t do the hero thing, and instead talks Claire through shooting an arrow at the killer, because as camp champion runner-up, he’s good at archery. A moment that clearly signifies he’s the ultimate camp counselor and should stay at camp for the rest of his life, you know? The other killer is killed by Robby, the stupid, insecure man-child type who’s desperate to get laid. Robby actually has an interesting potential arc in comparison to Jason, where they both can learn from each other to shave down their rougher edges. None of that happens. Robby doesn’t change at all, and it’s not clear why he’s positioned like secondary protagonist at the end with this kill. It’s tempting to say we spend the second most time with him, but I’m not actually sure that’s true. They also do multiple callbacks with him at the end that don’t land.
There’s also a lot of little things in between. The killer isn’t given a name, like Devilface or the Pineway Slasher or whatever. There’s Ezra, the gay thespian who is presumably someone’s best friend. His role is stereotypical and kinda derogatory, but it’s also so shallow and they’re all so scared to do anything with him that it doesn’t even rise to the level of offensive. He does get to do this cool thing at the beginning where he’s laying on the ground and rises up like a demon-possessed puppet. I can’t place Shannon as any kind of trope, so I think she’s defined as the one dating Chris. Like, I was worried for a while that her whole thing in the movie is being one of two Black characters, and that’s probably still true, but she’s not even like movie stereotypes of a Black teen, you know? Noelle is supposed to be the goth or witchy person, but she’s not really either of those things. She likes the occult and dresses like Hot Topic, but she acts like a typical sweet girl with no defining characteristics. In movie language, she doesn’t add up. I’m pretty sure the movie focuses on counselors before camp starts because they wanted to do sexy stuff and avoid sexualizing minors, not because they were referencing Friday the 13th. Not that it’s very sexy. I looked this up on Wikipedia to remember a character’s name, and the summary describes Claire as Jason’s ex-girlfriend. At no point in the movie is that made clear, no one ever brings it up, and so I think that’s a detail someone told the world in an interview or something. At one point, Jason didn’t recognize make-out point when Claire does, and one assumes they would have gone there together if they dated. Also, twenty-four isn’t too old to be a camp counselor. Like, I’m pretty sure summer camp is a myth created by Hollywood, like treehouses, but I’m also pretty sure that if it’s a real thing, counselor isn’t a job done exclusively by teenagers.
Like I said, it’s so easy to see what it could have been. They do a lot of Scream stuff, to the point that you expect some sort of meta bit at the core of the movie. I actually don’t think the movie would have benefited from a lot of meta stuff, though. Meta requires that you know what you’re doing and why, and Hell of a Summer is so far from self-aware. The extent of the meta that I think would benefit the movie is acknowledging the Friday the 13th comparison. The counselors all love that movie and immediately recognize the parallels when Camp Pineway owners John and Kathy don’t show up. Of course, no one thinks a killer will literally show up, so they decide to do like the classic movie and ignore their duties to swim in the lake and play strip poker. Jason is on the outs because he’s the only one who doesn’t like the movie, he’s not in on the shared world that the others are doing. It can even be a new experience for him, to be unincluded. They’ve all been friends for years. At the same time, he’s playing the grown-up, antagonizing the younger counselors. Rather than it being a choice (somehow) between being a camp counselor or a lawyer, everyone throws his future law career in his face, saying it makes him a stick in the mud to their fun. If they previously have a positive, full friendship and then turn on Jason, it becomes an interesting and good movie. Demi, the main killer, can be motivated by wanting to keep her summer camp memories alive forever by killing all her friends; the social media fame is her memory board, not her end goal. Jason can move on from camp at the end by realizing that he has to create his sense of community elsewhere instead of relying on this one place, which turns on him even before people start dying. Like, you give someone Scream the 13th, and it’s paint by numbers what they could have and should have done.
Also, this is just a silly thing for me to point out, but…Hell of a Summer? It was two days.
Weekly Art Blog 4/6-4/13/2025
Life in the Gutters 