Hell of a Summer creators, Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard and When You Finish Saving the World’s Billy Bryk, have been through hell and back to bring theatrical comedy back from its “dry spell.”
Bryk, Wolfhard, and one of the feature’s leads, Fred Hechinger, sat down with MovieWeb’s George Edelman to speak on the film and its strength of balancing the mixture between comedy, horror, and humanity. Bryk stated, “That was their goal from the beginning. To have humanity and comedy and horror all woven into one thing and never have one thing outweighing another.” Bryk credits comedy movies as their main inspiration, saying that they “grew up just loving comedy movies. That was sort of what we all bonded over—these classic coming-of-age comedies or ensemble comedies.” That of which all three agree are going through a dry spell.
A reason why Bryk is stoked that Hell of a Summer is getting its chance on the big screen through a theatrical release. Since COVID-19, theatrical releases for films have changed, with these releases getting rarer and a lot of films that would qualify for theatrical release ending up getting put directly on streaming platforms. Comedy movies getting theatrical releases are getting rarer and rarer, which is why Bryk is so “excited that Neon has committed to a theatrical release with this film.” His reason behind that is that “seeing comedy in theaters is so important… Almost all of my favorite moviegoing experiences as a kid was going to comedies with my friends.”
The feature was written and directed by Bryk and Wolfhard, with an ensemble made up of Hechinger, Wolfhard, Bryk, Abby Quinn, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Rosebud Baker, Pardis Saremi, and Adam Pally. The film synopsis reads as follows: “A 24-year-old camp counselor, Jason Hochberg (Hechinger), arrives at Camp Pineway thinking his biggest problem is that he feels out of touch with his teenage coworkers. What he doesn’t know is that a masked killer is lurking on the campgrounds, brutally picking counselors off one by one.”
Hell of a Summer debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023 and was released in theaters on April 4 to be met by mixed reviews, which praised the performances given but had criticisms of how the slasher tropes in the film were portrayed.
