It’s tempting, as “Stranger Things” lumbers towards a final season so long delayed the kids will probably have their AARP cards, to start finding new releases to fill the gaps. We’re talking purestrain nostalgia for the light-hearted kids’ films of the ’80s, whether they be Stephen King adaptations or Spielberg productions like “The Goonies.” “Monster Summer,” the micro-budgeted but big-hearted adventure from child-actor-turned-director David Henrie (he recently played a younger Reagan in the biopic of the same name), does the trick well enough, even as it doesn’t do much beyond play the witchy hits.
Instead of Derry in the ’80s, “Summer” plops us in the Martha’s Vineyard of the mid-’90s, where young Noah (Mason Thames, previously the lead in “The Black Phone“) plans to spend his summer with his best friends, help his mom (Nora Zehetner) run her B&B, and putter around on ten-speeds through the empty streets of the quiet suburb. But his grand ambition is to be a hard-hitting journalist like his pops, who died long ago (Spielberg riffs, like Pixar movies, can only ever give a child protag one parent). Problem is, the scandals he tries to break fall on deaf ears with the skeptical editor of the town newspaper (a fascinating cameo by Kevin James, playing it totally straight with a goofy Southern drawl), who insists he wants fluffy stories to attract tourists. Shades of Amity, right down to dressing like the mayor from “Jaws.”
But soon, a real story falls in his lap, as a series of mysterious child disappearances dovetail with the arrival of Miss Halverson (Lorraine Bracco), whose all-black ensemble and stringy white hair scream either “spinster novelist” or “secret witch.” She presents as the former, but Noah reads her very much as the latter. And when Noah’s best friend Ben (Noah Cottrell) falls under the same spell—going missing, then reappearing in a near-catatonic state—Noah recruits his other friends to help solve the mystery.
Of course, they need adult supervision, and the best candidate for that is, somehow, Gene (Mel Gibson), the crotchety, reclusive old neighbor who turns out to also be a retired detective with his own tragic backstory involving a missing child. Gibson plays him with all the gruff and growl he’s gotten used to playing in his later years, which fits him nicely into a reluctant father-and-son beat with Thames, the pair learning both to trust each other and solve the mystery. (Thames makes for a capable lead yet again, even as he’s left with little but to gawk and crack wise.)
It’s tempting, with all its derivations and the Gibson of it all, to write off “Monster Summer” as a disposable lark. And to an extent, it is. It’s so indebted to its influences it practically rubs your face in them, from the King-y credits font to offering “The Sandlot”‘s Patrick Renna an extended cameo as an umpire whose role expands in unexpected ways. Gibson can do this kind of role blindfolded, and with the dialogue he’s given, he kinda has to. (There’s a throwaway line about how “one wrong accusation can ruin a person’s reputation” that they had to give to him on purpose.) Still, there’s glimmers of the kind of morose, mournful energy he brought to “Signs” and “Mad Max” that help elevate what’s surely a deeply independent production.
The thing feels scrappy enough to give it a lot of leeway, from its handsome, if modest, production design to the sparse use of effects. The scares are sufficiently eerie for little kids, even if they won’t move a sufficiently skeptical grownup. The central mystery attempts a few twists and turns, but the final act depends on a twist so out of left field it literally comes from the film’s vestigial baseball subplot. But most of all, it feels like a stopgap kids’ adventure for those tots still waiting for the last season of Netflix’s blockbuster show to air, which is both its blessing and its curse. It won’t exactly hold you under its spell, but it might charm just enough for the sparse 90 minutes of attention it requests.
