These are the horrific events of a group of people in the summer of 1989. Events began when child friends and camp counselors arrived at the camp site three days before the start of the camp. It may be very bad when these strange people find out when the dark old legends of the camp wake up. It may have been a pleasant summer at first but soon turns into one of fear and evil that may seem very strange.
While the premise of Dead of Summer sounds familiar to any horror movie fan, the show benefits from not being directly tied to an existing horror franchise since it won't suffer for being compared to movies beloved by generations.
Dead of Summer makes for a schlocky hour that never quite gets boring. At the very least, while escaping the dog days of summer inside with the air-conditioning, there's plenty of fun to be had in laughing at how bad it is.
Dead of Summer is just run-of-the-mill unintentionally bad -- a mishmash of genres and structures and stock characters that maybe aspires to something original and falls flat.
Promise is the name of the game with Dead of Summer, with an opening three hours that are tonally on-point in the sun-drenched, 80's deathbed of Camp Stillwater, but lack any lucid, horrific hook.
If you're looking for your summer's new guilty pleasure, Dead of Summer is the one. It's bound to keep you guessing what exactly is going on at the camp during its present day and what happened in the 1800s
It apparently wants to evoke memories of everything from the '80s slasher film Sleepaway Camp to 2001's Wet Hot American Summer, but it lacks the energy, sex quotient, and scares-per-hour to achieve anything except a certain awkward creepiness.
Maybe Dead of Summer will turn out to be more than the sum of its parts, and triumph over the cliches on which it's constructed. Or maybe the characters will just wind up being picked off, one at a time. That would work, too.
