SUMMER OF 84 (2018)

Studio:       Gunpowder and Sky
Director:    Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell
Writer:       Matt Leslie, Stephen J. Smith
Producer:  Shawn Williamson, Jameson Parker, Matt Leslie, Van Toffler, Cody Zwieg
Stars:     Graham Verchere, Judah Lewis, Caleb Emery, Cory Gruter-Andrew, Jason Gray-Stanford, Shauna Johannesen, Tiera Skovbye, Rich Sommer

Review Score:

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Summary:

In a small town gripped by a string of child slayings, four friends secretly track a police officer neighbor suspected of being the serial killer.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Ipswich, Oregon – June, 1984 – 15-year-old conspiracy theory enthusiast Davey Armstrong delivers a newspaper to his police officer neighbor Wayne Mackey. Mackey asks Davey to help him carry a heavy piece of furniture into the basement. While down there, Davey notices a padlocked door.

Davey plays a nighttime hide-and-seek game called ‘Manhunt’ with his friends Curtis Farraday, Dale ‘Woody’ Woodworth, and Tommy ‘Eats’ Eaton. While hiding in some bushes, Davey spies Mackey talking to a teenage boy through Mackey’s dining room window.

In their treehouse clubhouse, the four boys discuss the recent rash of missing kids in surrounding suburbs. Later, the police publicly disclose that they are looking for a serial killer called “The Cape May Slayer,” who is confirmed to have killed at least 15 teenagers over a period of several years.

Davey recognizes the missing boy on a milk carton, Dusty Dewitt, as the boy he saw with Mackey while playing Manhunt. Davey tells Farraday, Woody, and Eats about his growing suspicion that Mackey may be The Cape May Slayer. Eats adds that his brother Kyle, who works at the hardware store, said Mackey buys hundreds of pounds of dirt on a weekly basis.

Davey proposes that the four friends find out the truth about Mackey. Davey, Farraday, Woody, and Eats begin staking out Mackey, tracking his movements, and going through his garbage.

Davey’s next-door neighbor Nikki Kaszuba, upon whom Davey has a longstanding crush, pays Davey a surprise visit shortly after catching the four friends spying on her undressing. Following a conversation, Davey feels Nikki is about to kiss him when his parents Randal and Sheila suddenly come home and interrupt.

The Cape May Slayer abducts another teenage boy that night.

With Woody driving his alcoholic mom’s station wagon without a license, the four friends follow Mackey on a hardware store run. On their drive home, the boys are pulled over by Officer Cole, who lets Woody go with just a warning.

Nikki invites Davey outside for beers and another late night conversation. Nikki discusses her parents’ troubling divorce. Davey tells Nikki his suspicion about Mackey.

Having not seen Mackey’s next-door neighbors the Hoffmans or their son Sammy in days, Davey and his three friends investigate the empty Hoffman house. Inside the house, they unexpectedly run into Nikki, who tells the boys that she watches the Hoffman family’s pets when they are away. Farraday, Woody, and Eats congratulate Davey when they confirm he really has been spending time with Nikki.

During a game of Manhunt, the four boys plant a walkie-talkie outside Mackey’s window for audio surveillance. Farraday sees Mackey inside his house wearing rubber gloves and handling cleaning supplies. Davey runs away when Mackey startles him.

Davey returns to Mackey’s house the following day to check on the malfunctioning walkie-talkie. Mackey confronts Davey. Davey notices freshly dug dirt in Mackey’s backyard garden before leaving hurriedly.

Through his binoculars that night, Davey sees Mackey spying back at him. Mackey places the walkie-talkie on his windowsill to let Davey know that he found it.

Woody and Farraday follow Mackey on his nighttime jog while Davey and Eats dig up Mackey’s garden. Woody and Farraday follow Mackey to a storage facility where Mackey retrieves a Volkswagen beetle. Woody and Farraday also spot dirt, tools, and sodium hydroxide in Mackey’s storage unit.

Davey and Eats do not find anything buried in Mackey’s yard. However, they break into Mackey’s padlocked shed and retrieve a bloody MTV shirt believed to have been worn by Dusty Dewitt.

Davey, Farraday, Woody, and Eats bring all of their evidence against Mackey to Davey’s parents. Angry, Davey’s father takes all four boys to Mackey and forces Davey to apologize for tearing up Mackey’s garden and accusing him of murder. Mackey explains that the boy Davey saw him with was his nephew Jamie. Mackey offers to call Jamie, but Randal says it isn’t necessary.

Feeling disheartened, Farraday, Woody, and Eats tell Davey they don’t want to follow Mackey anymore. Davey ends up grounded.

Davey sneaks out of his house to see Nikki again. Davey tells Nikki that he is still determined to stop Mackey.

Mackey stops over the Armstrong house when Davey is alone. Suspicious and fearful, Davey acts curt before asking Mackey to call his nephew. Mackey uses Davey’s phone, but no one answers on the other end. After Mackey leaves, Davey calls the operator and discovers that Mackey dialed his own house.

Davey’s mom calls Davey downstairs to watch a televised press conference during which Mackey is celebrated as a hero for arresting Arthur Ray Peterson for the Cape May Slayer killings. Desperate to prove Mackey is really the killer before more people die, Mackey convinces Farraday, Woody, and Eats to help him find out what is behind Mackey’s padlocked basement door.

With his parents, Mackey, and the majority of residents attending the Ipswich Bay Fest, Davey investigates Mackey’s basement while Woody films with Davey’s dad’s camcorder. Nikki joins Davey and Woody. Farraday monitors Mackey at the festival while Eats acts as a lookout on the street.

Farraday concludes that the dirt Mackey purchased was part of a police-sponsored restoration project at the pier. Convinced Mackey is not a killer, Farraday backs out of being a lookout along with Eats.

Davey, Woody, and Nikki pick Mackey’s padlock to find a room decorated with pictures and family photos of The Cape May Slayer’s victims. The trio discovers a mutilated boy’s body in a bloody bathtub before rescuing the other boy abducted earlier. On their way out, Davey sees a photo of him with his parents, indicating that Mackey targeted Davey to be the next victim.

Davey, Woody, and Nikki take the boy and the video footage to Sheriff Caldwell, who puts out an APB for Mackey. Nikki kisses Davey afterward to thank him for reuniting her parents.

Woody sleeps over Davey’s house. Mackey sneaks into Davey’s bedroom while everyone is asleep and kidnaps Davey and Woody.

Davey and Woody recover in the backseat of a car. Mackey lets the two boys run so he can chase them through the woods as a game. Mackey captures Woody and slits his throat.

Mackey catches Davey and slashes his leg. Mackey warns that he will let Davey go so that Davey can spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder until Mackey returns to kill him. Mackey then gets in his car and drives off.

Davey hobbles away, is found by searchers, and recovers in a hospital. Some time later, Nikki waves at Davey from a car as she leaves town with her parents, Farraday helps Eats clean up his house after Eats’ parents destroy it during a fight, and Davey resumes his paper route as a disillusioned teen.

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Review:

15-year-old paperboy Davey Armstrong centers “Summer of 84.”  Lining his bedroom walls with Weekly World News clippings clamoring about Nazi temples on the moon and secret societies of cannibals, Davey loves a good conspiracy theory, and his latest fascination with fabulism involves a delectable doozy.

‘The Cape May Slayer’ has been slashing teenage boys around Ipswich, Oregon while evading law enforcement for years.  Davey thinks he knows exactly who the serial killer is.  Thanks to some specious circumstantial evidence including a padlocked basement door, an abnormal amount of gardening dirt, and a milk carton kid he thinks he saw in the man’s house, Davey becomes convinced his nearby neighbor and friendly police officer Wayne Mackey has a side hobby of homicide.

Davey’s three best pals Farraday, Woody, and Eats would rather spend June, July, and August thumbing through porno magazines, playing nighttime games of hide-and-seek, and using binoculars to ogle Nikki, the longtime object of Davey’s affection.  Davey has a more elaborate idea for adventure in mind.  By hook or by crook, he’s going to uncover Mackey’s supposed secret, and it’s going to take all four friends to unravel the mystery.

A lot of chatter out there, from people who’ve seen the film as well as from some who’ve only watched a trailer, repeatedly likens “Summer of 84” to “Stranger Things,” “Stand by Me,” “It” (review here), or any other coming-of-age terror tale planted inside a period piece.  Really though, that’s partly a copout comparison made mainly because those properties share misfit friends as protagonists while heavily peppering in nods to a bygone decade.  Anyone anticipating a straight echo of Stephen King or The Duffer Brothers based solely on the surface appearance of bike-riding boys in the 1980s might find “Summer of 84” catching presumptive expectations off guard.

“Summer of 84” does predictably hit expected beats for a summertime-set story tethered tightly to its titular year.  The four boys hide out in a treehouse clubhouse, bike to a bowling alley during a montage scored with Bananarama, read comic books by flashlight in bed, and so on.  People who have problems with how thick “Stranger Things” lays on its retro references will roll their eyes at dithering dialogue incorporating copious callbacks to “Gremlins” and “Return of the Jedi,” as well as a depiction of cul-de-sac suburbia built from a visual vocabulary of 1980s pop culture.

Nostalgia is not the quiet thriller’s dependant bread and butter however.  Slowly smoked intrigue is.

You won’t spend much time wondering whether or not Mackey is capable of being the bad guy Davey thinks he might be.  But Rich Sommer of “Mad Men” and “GLOW” smacks a home run to centerfield between next-door nice guy and secretive slickster to make an excellent “is he or isn’t he?” foil for Davey’s intrepid inquisitions.  Sommer’s satisfyingly sly performance renders the iffy effectiveness of Mackey’s mystery mostly moot.

Ably anchored by Graham Verchere as Davey, the key quartet pulls their weight with equal force.  Externally, the foursome wears the usual archetypes of noodle-armed nerd, chubby schlub, smart-mouthed troublemaker, and average teen encountering difficulty transitioning to adulthood.  In practice, the four boys exhibit interchangeable personalities and purposes, even though the young actors make them endearing enough to maintain invested engagement in their escalating endangerment.

The movie undermines the cast’s collective charisma by cheating them out of appropriate development.  Woody gets a single scene to tend to his distraught, alcoholic mother.  Eats also only receives one sequence to cry over his physically fighting parents, and at a time when suddenly inserting fractured family melodrama without a real resolution anyway is too little too late.  “Summer of 84” seemingly only includes intrapersonal moments out of a sense of obligation rather than narrative necessity.

Mischaracterization cuts further into the boys’ entertainment value.  Forget excessive 1980s-ness.  Matt Leslie and Stephen J. Smith’s screenplay leans deep overboard on crassness, making multiple masturbation and mom jokes, and lustily drooling over women both on a stapled page and in reality.  I was a boy in 1984 and yeah, joking about AIDS or calling a buddy “retarded” were dumb things said to get a rise out of someone.  But the movie doesn’t temper that reality with a fun factor that would push the four friends all the way over their often unfortunate obnoxiousness.

Unbalanced writing lessens “Summer of 84’s” punch while redirecting where that fist lands.  After a slow yet strong start reels in attention spans with a throwback thriller tone, believability starts rattling on the rails once the last cat comes out of the bag.  An improbably plotted final 15 minutes leaves off on a depressingly bleak note betraying a majority of the movie’s mood. You definitely won’t leave the film feeling upbeat.

Uncoupled from criticisms, “Summer of 84” still shines as a solid sophomore feature from “Turbo Kid” (review here) teammates Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell.  It’s not as universally appealing as their previous effort.  But the shifting tonal direction shows the RKSS trio wading in deeper waters, which may be more exciting as a promise for their filmmaking future than this movie is in the present.  Imperfectly conceived via a stuttering screenplay, “Summer of 84” nevertheless maintains enough mystique to warrant a worthwhile watch.

Review Score:  65

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