Final Summer (2023) Review
Final Summer (2023) Review
Pack your bags for FINAL SUMMER – an ’80s-inspired summer camp slasher that sees a group of camp counsellors fighting for their lives against a masked killer. We head back to 1991, after a long summer of fun and games at Camp Silverlake, where organisers are preparing to shut down the camp for the final season before it is sold to developers.
But there’s something – or someone – waiting in the darkness to exact bloody revenge on the unsuspecting campers. Who is the masked menace and what do they want?
FINAL SUMMER marks the directorial debut from John Isberg – who also writes and co-produces the film – and it’s a throwback to the campsite-based slasher flicks of the Eighties but set in the Nineties. It wastes no time getting into the slashing at the expense of establishing the characters and consequently there’s no empathy for any of the potential victims. It could be reasoned that this was also the case with its main inspiration, FRIDAY THE 13TH, but even those flicks took longer to establish characters and their dynamics before they were hacked or bludgeoned to death.
Recent retro-slasher SHE CAME OUT OF THE WOODS took the campsite slasher and gave it a supernatural spin. FINAL SUMMER offers up no new spins on the genre, opting instead for a retread of the tried and tested formula. There’s plenty of fake scares and the tone is harsher and less playful than its main inspiration. It is also more one-note and I guessed correctly who might be behind the killings very early on. It’s essentially nothing more than an extended chase as the skeleton masked killer despatches the hysterical youngsters one by one.
TRAILER
On UK digital 18 September 2023 from Miracle Media Limited
