Monster Summer

Monster Summer follows young Noah, who plans to spend his summer with friends on Martha’s Vineyard in the mid-90s. However, their fun is disrupted by a series of mysterious child disappearances. Noah, aspiring to be a journalist like his late father, suspects the new arrival, Miss Halverson, might be involved. Teaming up with his friends and a retired detective named Gene, Noah embarks on a spooky adventure to uncover the truth and save their island.

Monster Summer Review

Monster Summer is a somewhat frustrating film in that one can see it has the bones of a much better movie. Unfortunately, its writers miss one opportunity after another by introducing potentially fun world-building and character elements only to ignore them completely. That the film is set on an island is irrelevant. That the island is Martha’s Vinyard is meaningless. The lead child’s core friends are introduced only to have no distinctive personalities and are rendered nonentities for much of the film, and the list goes on. Everything that occurs is perfunctory and lacking in depth and possesses all but the shallowest of subtext.

However, the pacing is adequate, and Mel Gibson’s underdeveloped role benefits from his underrated talent. Monster Summer also provides a few scares that, while by the numbers, are fun and age-appropriate. That really is the movie’s saving grace; it is a horror film, but in the tradition of much better films like 1990’s The Witches and 1987’s The Monster Squad, Monster Summer does a relatively good job at neither talking down to its audience nor fully retreating into overly simple childishness of modern children’s horror like Netflix’s I Woke Up A Vampire. Instead, the stakes are real and treated seriously, if not skillfully.

INAPPROPRIATE ELEMENTS in Monster Summer

Night Swim

• The main characters are not yet old enough to drive, but one of the early scenes shows two young teens, a boy and a girl, going for a romantic night swim in the ocean. While the two are wearing bathing suits, the scene is shot so that, at first, it appears as if they are stripping naked in front of one another.

Did He Say What I Think He Said

• In one scene, it sounded like Mel Gibson said, “hell.” However, I truly can’t be sure, and the rest of the film seems to go out of its way to neither curse nor use the Lord’s name in vain.

Boo

• It may be mediocre, but it is a horror film that can be intense and even violent occasionally.
• The film is about an evil witch who kills children and eats them, though she spends most of the movie dining on their souls.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Maybe

• Two of the best friends are a tomboy and a black boy. You might argue that their inclusion is manufactured, and yeah, the black boy was probably a token hire, but the tomboy is right out of the book.