Horror Movie Review: Dark Summer (2015)

Ah, a run of good horror movies for the website comes to a crashing halt with this awful supernatural horror that sees a teenager put under house arrest after he stalked a female classmate online.

Daniel is instantly dislike-able thanks to this & his constant ‘poor me’ attitude makes you want to see him get everything that is coming his way.

As part of his house arrest he has an ankle monitor that keeps him within the boundary of his home and he is not allowed visits or access to the internet. Two of his friends (somehow, he still has friends) sneak over & hook him up with an internet connection so he can Skype is mother who is out of town. Before he can though he gets a video call from the girl he had been stalking, Mona.

She babbles on briefly before shooting herself.

From this point on Daniel begins to be haunted by the spirit of Mona who seems to want revenge on him. Stuck in the house, Daniel can’t escape the spirit but he doesn’t exactly get support from his friends who think his obsession with her is driving this.

Like all supernatural movies things build & build but here we get a twist climax that reveals Daniel may not have been as psycho as he first seemed. It’s an interesting revelation but one that lacks impact because of how unlikable Daniel actually is. After the film had spent so long convincing me that he was a creep who drove a girl to suicide it’s hard to look at him in a different light for the final 15 minutes.

The story lacks a lot; it tries to pepper these deeper moments that are supposed to relate to Daniels mindset but these come across horribly & just serve to make him even more unlikable.

The worst thing about this movie though are the ‘scares’. A Goosebumps episode had more terror in 20-minutes then this does throughout. It lacks subtly & imagination, happily throwing the ghostly figure of Mona out and about at every opportunity. What makes it worse is that by the end her ‘haunting’ him to such a degree actually makes little sense.

There are few redeeming parts of the movie…the music is awful with far too many close up shots of the characters. Daniel’s friends get very little development (Kevin in particular gets nothing!) so it seems as though they are often there just to further the story because Daniel can’t leave.

That in itself should have been a great idea, a house arrest & a haunting combined but it’s not told well instead serving as nothing more then a hindrance.

I’d probably stay away from this one.