Long-time friends Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk share directing, producing, writing and starring credits in their enjoyable and goofy riff on camp slasher films.

It’s summer, and Camp Pineaway is gearing up for another round of campers and counsellors. In fact, the counsellors gather the weekend before camp opens to prepare, get reacquainted, drunk, high, and perhaps busy.

Jason (Fred Hechinger) is back for his sixth year and the oldest of the bunch at twenty-four. He’s given up a huge opportunity to return to camp, perhaps holding too tightly onto his nostalgic childhood. He thinks he’s in line to take over the camp, and works to wrangle the slightly younger counsellors.

Amongst them are Wolfhard’s Chris and Bryk’s Bobby, but will they survive when a masked killer starts piling up the bodies over the course of one bloody night.

Hell of a Summer more often goes for the gag than the gore but it’s clear the directing duo are fans of the horror subgenre. Their script layers out the stereotypical counsellor characters as much as they can to move the story along, filling the friendships with the goofy interactions you expect from friends who have known each other for such a long time.

The film doesn’t exactly skewer the camp slasher film, but there is definitely a sly sense of humour running throughout it, and Bryk and Wolfhard turn in an enjoyable romp that lets the pair, and the rest of their young cast shine.

There’s a lot of fun banter, some laugh-out-loud moments, and a solid understanding of how these films work, including the twists and turns that reveal who the real killer is. And while the gore could definitely have been upped a notch, we only get really one good kill on screen, this one was no doubt a crowdpleaser when it first debuted during TIFF’s Midnight Madness.

In fact, this could be a gateway film for a number of potential horror fans who aren’t quite ready for the all-out horrors of Crystal Lake and others.

Hell of a Summer screens one last time at TIFF, on Saturday 16 September at Scotiabank. You can check times, and find other films and events here.