I could write many…many words about Dark Summer, but I’m not going to. I’m going to cut right to the chase and tell you what you need to hear. Dark Summer is not a good horror film. I won’t be offended if you decide to stop reading now, but if you’d like to hear me back up this assertion – allow me to do so.

Dark Summer is essentially Disturbia without any of the good stuff. Well, that’s not completely true. The movie looks decent enough. In fact, if there is a preset named “Disturbia” in Adobe After Effects, I’m pretty sure they used it. You might think I’m going a bit far with this comparison, but I’m not. Even a character in the film says “This is just like that Shia Labeouf movie”. Yep. Swear to god. I can look past that though. I mean, Disturbia was pretty rad, so being compared to it can’t be all that bad, right? Wrong.

Other than sheer production value, Dark Summer has very little to offer. The story is just bad. I feel rude for putting it so bluntly, but it’s all I could think about in this hour and sixteen minutes of nonsense. It’s absolutely littered with technical inaccuracies that I’m sure most won’t pick up on, but I’d be willing to bet several do. There is very little dialogue, and not in that classy art house kind of way. In that “we don’t really have shit to say” kind of way.. What little bit of interaction there is between characters is just sort of goofy. Kids don’t say “dope”…period. Maestro Harrell is solid though. I’d like to see more of him in genre flicks.

By the time any sort of climax in the film was reached , I was so incredibly disinterested that it didn’t matter anymore. I just wanted it to be over. There are some decent jump scares littered throughout, but nothing a four year old couldn’t achieve by jumping out of a closet as you walk by.

This is my first review of 2015, and I feel I need to watch something else desperately to get the memory of this one off my brain. Luckily, Dark Summer is so…forgetable, that I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. Sorry guys.