“Canceled” Oscar winner Mel Gibson takes a break from the violent, vengeful B-movies that have kept him busy for a decade for “Monster Summer,” a witchy kiddie horror picture directed by a child actor who grew up on “The Wizards of Waverly Place.”
Good production values and a solid supporting cast don’t hide the fact that it’s a tepid thriller that barely works up a decent fright or two. Derivative, nostalgic and old fashioned, director David Henrie’s horror-with-training-wheels tale is is perfectly watchable before a cringy blast of violence is added to spice up its weary formula.
A 1997 period piece set on Martha’s Vineyard but filmed in budget-friendly Southport, N..C, it’s about strange goings-on that point to childrden’s souls being snatched by something that rides around on a broom — or a 1980s Lincoln station wagon.
Aspiring journalist Noah (Mason Thames) is trying to “get off this island” and get printed in the local paper (Kevin James plays its drawling editor) and figures he has a world-famous scoop on his hands, if he can badger besties Sammy (Abby James Witherspoon) and Eugene (Julian Lerner) into backing him up in his search for “the truth.”
As their bestie baseball star pal Ben (Noah Cotrell) is among the first victims, you’d think they have incentive enoug.
Might this mysterious, Latin-chanting woman in black (Lorraine Bracco) staying at Noah’s mom’s Orca Inn be behind these “encounters” that leave kids haunted and almost catatonic? Or could the creepy old loner whose “family disappeared” years before be the perp?
Gibson plays Old Man Carruthers, who turns out to be an ex-cop who might dismiss Noah with “There’s no such thing as witches” and joke that “Why don’t you give that Fox Mulder a call?” But he asks some questions and develops some suspicions.
Meanwhile, kids are being attacked in the woods, in the water, and are never the same after these encounters.
Henrie and his screenwriters reach for Stephen King for Kids here, with hints of “It!” grafted onto elements of such earlier films as “Mean Green,” “Sandlot” or Gibson’s own “The Man Without a Face.” Sequences and plot threads almost work, but they barely fit together.
They try to summon up laughs — “Don’t accept poison apples from little old ladies with warts on their noses!” — and fail.
This is no “Wizards of Waverly Place.” The suspense is never much more than middling, with a couple of jolts that pay off. And the big finish has the violent stamp of “Lethal Weapon Lite” and feels out of tone with the bland but inoffensive time killer that “Monster Summer” has been up until then.
Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity
Cast: Mason Thames, Mel Gibson, Julian Lerner, Lorraine Bracco, Abby James Witherspoon, Noah Cotrell, Patrick Renna and Kevin James.
Credits: Directed by David Henrie, scripted by Bryan Schulz and Cornelius Uliano. A Pastime Pictures release.
Running time: 1:37
