Monster Summer Parent Guide

After seeing a trailer for Monster Summer, I had hopes it would skillfully balance the terrifying with the hilarious. Watching it, I found those hopes disappointed, as it ultimately contained nothing that scared me and nothing that made me laugh.

Monster Summer follows a group of kids on Martha’s Vineyard in 1997, with the focus on protagonist Noah (Mason Thames), an aspiring investigative reporter whose widowed mother operates an inn catering to tourists. We meet the gang on the baseball field and in their treehouse-style clubhouse filled with Red Sox fan paraphernalia. When one of the group, Ben (Noah Cottrell) is plunged into a near-catatonic state, Noah—sometimes with his friends and sometimes against their urging—investigates. As more spaced-out victims pile up, the view coming into focus looks increasingly like the villain must be—a witch?

Thrown into the mix is Gene (Mel Gibson), an initially mysterious and cantankerous recluse about whom the local children tell chilling tales. Gene turns out to be a retired police officer with investigative resources, and he decides to help Noah in his quest.

If you think these characters and setting sound like something from an early teen novel, I agree (though it shouldn’t be confused with books of the same title by Jack Myers and Kendra C. Highley). There’s even a Roblox game based on it. Perhaps the film’s biggest problem is that it’s apparently aimed at a 10- to 15-year-old audience but is rated PG-13. (Given that the violence comes in lower than the average superhero movie, I don’t think the rating is going to be much of a deterrent.) There are also some lost opportunities: a quick-moving plot that lacks depth and a potentially great performance from Mel Gibson that fails to materialize thanks to the undemanding script.

This film explores the theme of monsters in several ways: There’s the main whodunnit plotline about children turning into near-zombies. There’s also the specter of Gene as a Boo Radley type (but that mystery is disappointingly brief). And Gene’s backstory introduces another type of monster: The human kind that hurts children.

Monster Summer gets lost by going in too many directions and never far enough in any of them. It comes close to saying something about how we treat others as monsters, or about how we misplace our fears and miss the real monsters around us. But in the end, it opts to treat those ideas only superficially and puts most of its energy into a conclusion that relies too much on what one character calls “wart-wearing fairy tale” clichés. The final reveal turns out to be not much different from a false lead earlier in the picture.

The best horror films use fear with a strong emphasis on dread (Uh oh, something’s going to happen!), a little bit on terror (Aah! Something’s happening!) and even less on actual horror (Ew, something happened!). Monster Summer misses out on the opportunity to maximize dread. For example, the film’s opening shows a dark landscape accompanied by foreboding music, but then immediately leaps into an attempted jump-scare moment involving a partial glimpse of the monster it will eventually reveal. This is typical of the film: there’s potential here, but it’s never fully realized. It’s not unwatchable, especially for its target audience, but there’s nothing in this film that will stick in your memory.