Monster Summer

You can tell that Monster Summer is not a major studio production by its casting. The biggest actor in this family-oriented PG-13 film is Mel Gibson, the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s A-lister who directed a Best Picture winner and then the highest-grossing independent film of all time, only to fall from grace over scandals in the mid-aughts. Gibson has somewhat recovered behind the camera, earning a Best Director Academy Award nomination for 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge, but his long legacy of high-profile lead roles sort of ends with 2002’s Signs, giving way to supporting roles and a handful of unpromising geezer teasers.

Despite a few notable gigs, Gibson isn’t booking lead roles in major studio films and he probably never will again. But that makes his unexpected performance one of the more interesting aspects of Monster Summer, a throwback mystery thriller that marks the premiere wide release of a new studio named Pastime Pictures.

Although it feels like it’s adapted from some forgotten YA yarn of yore, Monster is actually an original tale penned by Bryan Schulz, the grandson of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, and his fellow modern Peanuts Movie/”Snoopy Presents” writer-producer Cornelius Uliano.

Schulz and Uliano’s screenplay is rough around the edges and willing to go to dark places most contemporary youth adventures would avoid. That makes for a film that’s slightly more unpredictable and unpolished than your standard issue, market-tested major studio diversion.

It’s the summer of 1997 in Cape Cod and Noah (Mason Thames, The Black Phone) is spending it playing baseball, chilling in his treehouse, and occasionally butting heads with his widowed mother, who runs an old B&B. Noah has an appetite for true crime reporting and for fun, he and his friends do some digging into local legends. Unfortunately, the local newspaper editor (an out-of-place Kevin James) rejects Noah’s submissions.

When bestie Eugene (Julian Lerner) has a traumatic night on the beach and returns home a silent shell of himself, Noah thinks there’s a story to tell and a mystery to investigate. He enlists grumpy, retired police detective Gene (Gibson) to help him make sense of clues that are pointing to a witch that Noah thinks might be the creepy older woman (Lorraine Bracco) staying at his mom’s B&B.

Second-time director David Henrie, familiar to younger millennials as Selena Gomez’s big brother on “Wizards of Waverly Place”, embraces the aesthetic and air of ’90s family films, which I’m embarrassed to recognize must now be considered “old school.” Jansport and L.L. Bean backpacks abound and there is nary a cell phone in sight. That’s bound to appeal to many parents in their thirties and forties. It’ll appeal to their kids if they’ve taken to ’90s “classics” like Jumanji, Matilda, and The Sandlot. Patrick Renna, the most visually iconic cast member of The Sandlot, picks up his biggest movie role in at least a quarter-century playing the umpire in the kids’ little league games. It’s a fun piece of nostalgic stunt casting that will put a smile on anyone that recognizes him thirty years older, which is somehow bizarrely easy to do.

In case it’s not abundantly clear, Monster Summer evokes the vibe of ’90s “Goosebumps” but with better production values and less silliness than the Fox TV series that was adapted from R.L. Stine’s bestselling book line. It’s wild to see the highly weathered and inexplicably limping Gibson throw himself at something akin to a live-action Scooby-Doo movie with vim and vigor. I’m not sure that the actor and his director got on the same page and figured out together the movie they wanted to make. The trauma that hangs over Gibson’s character comes easily to the actor. The wry one-liners he’s given, not so much. The word “monsters” repeatedly serves as a battle cry for Gene. It’s clear to us that he’s not talking about ghosts and goblins but the type of real world evil that Gibson’s Passion of the Christ lead Jim Caviezel confronted in last year’s blockbuster Sound of Freedom.

Monster Summer does not, by any stretch, go all in on those themes or play into Gibson’s conservative fanbase. This is apolitical filmmaking designed to have mainstream appeal only without the major studio backing or traditional marketing channels. There’s no information published about Monster Summer‘s budget, but it seems to work with the type of mid-level budget that has become unfashionable in recent years. Think somewhere in between The Sandlot‘s $7 million and the $25 million spent on Gibson’s kindred 1993 directorial debut The Man Without a Face.

Opening directly across from Joker: Folie à Deux is a bold move for any film and all the more so coming from a distributor with no track record whatsoever. Monster Summer seems to have just popped up from nowhere; I certainly hadn’t heard of the movie until its week-early screening was announced a week in advance. Expectations are bound to be muted, with The Wild Robot and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice also likely to continue attracting repeat business. At least Monster screened for critics in my major metropolis, which is more than can be said for the Joker sequel that had long been my most anticipated film of the year and White Bird, the repeatedly-delayed, Holocaust-set Wonder prequel/sequel that is certain to add to Lionsgate’s ongoing losing streak.