Superstab
They’ll make slashers about anything these days. Time loops, multiverses, romantic comedies, unbirthing yourself, time travel, body swaps… now summer camp counselors at a lake? This is getting out of hand! That’s right, with Hell of a Summer, the slasher defies current trends by returning to its roots: horny teens hanging out near a lake and getting stabbed by an unseen killer, one-by-one.
If you’re reading a review of a limited release slasher comedy in the year 2025, you probably don’t need me to explain that 1980’s Friday the 13th is one of the seminal slasher texts: It’s not the first or best entry in the genre, but perhaps the most influential, the one that codified most of the tropes into formula. It launched not just a dozen sequels but a hundred imitators. The slasher format comes back into vogue every ten or fifteen years with some new horror tone or narrative twist or vibe that the studios want to mine for cheap box office returns.
All of that is what makes Hell of a Summer feel just a little out of step. It behaves, at least through the first half, like Friday the 13th is the only slasher movie that co-writers/directors (and twentysomething actors) Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk have ever seen. It has little use for postmodern shenanigans or high concepts. The pair fastidiously recreate the scenario of Friday the 13th, simply because they think it’s cool and want to make their own comedy version of it. (The pair cite Shaun of the Dead as a major inspiration, but “zombie movie with jokes” was a lot more novel in 2004 than “slasher with jokes” is in the 2020s.)
It’s clear that the movie’s target audience is more Stranger Things fans (re: Wolfhard) and teen comedy lovers than slasher-heads. It is practically allergic to genre obligations to a level that’s borderline reckless and alienating: The kills occur mostly off-screen and amount to run-of-the-mill stabbings and decapitations. The boring murders are not about dodging an R-rating; the movie’s full of sex talk, drug use, and profanity, and the MPAA slapped it with an R nonetheless. I suspect the pair have little interest in horror, and simply used a slasher scenario as the loosest and easiest possible narrative framework to slide into “horror comedy.” There’s no final girl, no climactic chases, no real tension or catharsis in the deaths themselves.
One trope that is fulfilled: The plot kicks off with an opening murder. The owners of Camp Crystal Lake… errr, Camp Pineway meet undignified ends. One, an annoying campfire-side guitar crooner, gets his six-string snapped and jammed through his throat. It’s easily the funniest and cleverest kill in the film. Cut to the next day: a cadre of counselors show up to prep for summer before the younglings arrive. They assume the owners are out on errands. Among the arriving staff is Jason Hochberg (Fred Hechinger), a deeply corny 24-year-old camp lifer and nostalgia addict who treats Pineway like it’s sacred ground. Everyone else is presumably 18 or 19, except for Claire (Abby Quinn), with whom Jason has some unresolved romantic tension. Claire is a couple of years older than most of the other staff members, or maybe just more mature.
Among the other counselors: social media hottie Demi (Pardis Saremi), himbo Mike (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), witchy Noelle (Julia Lalonde), self-absorbed theater kid Ezra (Matthew Finlan), and a few others who mostly won’t make it to the credits (though more do survive the runtime than you’d probably guess). Wolfhard and Bryk show up as two dum-dums. That night, the masked killer promptly dispatches Demi, the vainest of the bunch. Jason finds her body, but it vanishes, and nobody believes him. When it becomes clear that death is indeed afoot, everyone pivots and accuses Jason of being the killer himself.
(The killer’s identity is eventually revealed, of course, and for a few minutes in the middle of the film, I thought the movie was going to lean really hard on its Friday the 13th homage: We briefly meet Jason’s mother at the start of the film. She’s unhappy he’s wasting another summer at the camp and is looking for some way to convince him to come home…)
What keeps the film afloat through its dimly-lit and poorly-staged carnage isn’t terror or tension (both essentially absent) but the dynamics between the various teen counselors. The cast is having tons of fun. The ensemble is too big for every character to really stick, but their archetypes are sharply drawn and their banter crackles. Importantly, the film gets funnier, not just noisier, as the violence ratchets and everyone turns against each other. The dialogue has that adolescent zing that feels written by someone who actually knows what being eighteen sounds like; given Bryk and Wolfhard wrote the first draft of the script when they were 21 and 19, this makes sense. (I loved the touch that the 24-year-old is the hopelessly out-of-touch geezer. All y’all are kids. Signed, a 36 year old.)
This film is the most that I’ve bought into Fred Hechinger’s boyish charisma. He gives Jason the kind of earnest, heartsick energy that simultaneously wins you over and annoys the crap out of you. But Jason’s love for Camp Pineway and his struggle to fit in with kids who only barely remember his name give the movie a surprising emotional throughline that anyone who went to a memorable summer camp as a teen will recognize. I can’t remember the last time a slasher gave me a character I was actually rooting for this hard. I was even invested in his fumbled romance with Claire.
The second half of the film shifts tone to more closely resemble Scream. Once the body count ticks up and the group turns on itself, the movie starts toying with misdirection and meta twists. The stretch where the counselors are convinced that Jason is the killer is pretty hysterical. Characters debate the significance of the kill order and jockey for spots in the narrative for the sake of favorable media coverage. The reveal of the killer and their motivation feels particularly inspired by the Scream series.
Whether Hell of a Summer works for you will depend almost entirely on your tolerance for two things: teen hangout movies and slashers that aren’t all that interested in being slashers. The puts me squarely in its crosshairs. If you want slick kills, gnarly gore, and high-strung tension… well, you probably shouldn’t be watching a comedy directed by the kid from Stranger Things, anyway. But if you’re down for a low-key comedy that has Friday the 13th on the brain, you’ll have a decent time. There’s not a lot of substance here, but the film has a comic pulse I dug. I give it the softest of passing grades.
Time will tell whether Bryk and Wolfhard (together or separate) have a full directing career ahead of them, or if this was more of a one-off. Given that its appeal is almost entirely its teen spirit and fresh energy rather than any sort of solid bones on the filmmaking or writing front, I’m not convinced the magic is sustainable. But not everyone can pull off comedy, and they do, so kudos to them. The cast is game, the dialogue snaps, and there’s enough personality to make it worth the 88 minutes.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.