Lifetime
Lifetime’s Sunday Night Thrills movies are hit or miss. Some of them can be surprisingly good and others can be a complete waste of time. One would hope for the best with a movie cheekily titled Dead Girl Summer, but it quickly becomes apparent that we’re going to be on the lower end if the spectrum.
The movie opens promisingly with a beautifully photographed prologue on a fishing dock on a lake. A grandfather and his grandson are preparing a hook when the boy notices something floating in the distance. Grandpa quickly realizes it is a body. Cut to four years later and friends Avery (Sydney Hamm) and Jade (Madison May Crawford) are on a road trip to Avery’s family summer home, which they are preparing to sell as Avery’s dad is having health issues and it’s too much for them to keep up with. Avery is handling the prep work before it goes on the market and her friend has tagged along. But there is another reason for the trip as well as Avery received a text from their summer friend Will asking them to come for a visit because he has some new information to share with them. At this point, things are vague for the viewer, but the information pertains to the body which, through flashbacks, we learn was their friend Mia (Danielle Madison) who disappeared after a bonfire, her body found four days later in the lake, her death presumed to be an accident by cliff jumping into the lake (despite the autopsy showing bruises on her neck and body not consistent with a jumping accident).
Once they arrive, Avery and jade quickly head over to see Will but he’s not home (they’ve also been having issues texting him). Instead they meet his girlfriend Daniella (Savoy Bailey), who Will has never mentioned. She has a bit of an attitude with Avery, assuming that she and Will may have had a thing at one point (Avery is quick to shoot that down), and she warms up, inviting them to the bonfire later that evening. Avery isn’t keen on going, but Jade is all in. They head over to Will’s (McKalin) job and he claims he has no idea what texts they are alleging he sent. (For some reason, neither he nor Avery bother to compare the texts on their phones.) Leaving, they also bump into Eric, who seems less than pleased to see the girls back in town. Avery does decide to go to the bonfire with Jade but begins to feel sick so Will takes her home, leaving Jade to party with Daniella. The next day, Jade is nowhere to be found and Avery begins to panic because things are playing out exactly as they did four years earlier. She’s even more concerned when she finds Jade’s bracelet on the dock in the exact same spot where Mia’s was found when she died. The police form a search party and when Avery and Will get to the barn where Mia was held before she was dumped in the lake, Will offers to go in and look but he says there is no one inside. Fearing that someone connected with Mia is replaying the murder for revenge, Avery and Eric call a truce and work together to put all the pieces together as the local police are of no help. As things fall into place, the truth of Mia’s death comes out and Jade’s disappearance is linked to a case of revenge, but will Avery be able to find her before the dreaded fourth day?
Lifetime
Dead Girl Summer has a promising premise but it’s undone by a few factors, some of them just sloppy writing that we’re supposed to accept without question. Like the character of Daniella, who know one has ever heard of. There’s also the matter of the texts which will have you screaming at the TV for Will to look at his damn phone. Jade’s bracelet is another issue because whoever placed it on the dock in the precise spot would have to have some knowledge of Mia’s abduction and murder, so writer Ashley O’Neil just has Avery say the location of the bracelet was common knowledge because it was in the paper (really, the newspaper listed precisely what plank the bracelet was found on?). You also have to be really paying attention as the story quickly jumps from present to past to present again, keeping track of who is or isn’t in each part of the storyline. There’s also some vagueness in the relationships between Mia & Will and Mia & Eric, and no real explanation as to why Eric is so angry when he sees Avery and Jade for the first time (he seems to hold them responsible for Mia’s murder, and in the flashback to the bonfire he clearly has feelings for her which she rebuffs but that had nothing to do with Avery or Jade, it only serves to set him up as a suspect). There’s a lot going on but not a lot of it makes sense. The film, though, is directed well enough and has some lovely cinematography with a use of colors — golden hues for the past, bluish and natural light for the present — to differentiate between the years the story takes place. On that point, the film is a success.
What really sinks the movie are the performances. Sydney Hamm only has a handful of credits to her name and here she struggles with being invested in the storyline. She does come to life a couple of times but she always appears sleepy, like the drug she was given at the bonfire never left her system. McKalin, who has an impressive list of credits on IMDb, comes off the worst, his line readings often sounding like … line readings at the table read, with little emotion behind any of them. Perhaps the director wanted him to come across as flat and one-dimensional so the climax would be more shocking, but whatever the thought process was it does not pan out for the actor or the character (and a flashback of Will trying to make out with Mia is just awkward and embarrassing as McKalin grunts loudly to portray passion). Spoiler alert here if you haven’t yet watched the movie — Savoy Bailey basically puts a neon sign over Daniella’s head with an arrow pointing to her that screams ‘I did it!’ Just from her behavior when Avery and Jade first meet her, you know it was she who sent the texts asking them to come, and with that you know she did something to Jade for revenge because she is somehow related to Mia (not a sister, though, which is what I thought). It’s still never clear why everyone thinks Avery and Jade had anything to do with Mia’s death. Bailey is always just a little too over-the-top which makes her the obvious culprit so there is little-to-no mystery to solve except for who actually killed Mia (and that answer really doesn’t come as a surprise).
Roman Randolph is actually okay as Eric. He’s not written well at first, given no motivation for his outrage at seeing Avery and Jade, but as he begins to help Avery he feels like a real person. Danielle Madison is fine as Mia in the flashbacks. The best of the bunch is Madison May Crawford as Jade, giving her performance a real P.J. Soles vibe, the happy-go-lucky, fun-loving friend performance that Soles patented back in late 1970s horror movies Carrie and Halloween. She really brings her scenes to life and when she disappears her absence is felt. She’s also given a bit of ridiculousness in the writing at the end, somehow knowing that Mia scratched the name of her killer into a piece of wood in the barn (even though in the flashback it’s clear that she’s dead instantly and did not crawl out of the empty space where her body was stashed, scratched the name into the wood, and crawled back to the space, somehow covering it again with the two pieces of wood). How on earth would Jade know what Mia did in that moment, especially considering the girl was dead and Jade wasn’t there? This whole explanation comes about because Avery gets wet orange paint on her sleeve, and she remembers the same paint on someone else’s sleeve the night of the murder. So you’re telling us that paint in the barn stayed wet for FOUR YEARS?! Again, sloppy writing that we’re supposed to just accept. It really insults the intelligence of the audience.
In the end, Lifetime was probably hoping for a ‘hot girl summer’ with this movie; unfortunately Dead Girl Summer is just DOA.
Dead Girl Summer has a run time of 1 hour 28 minutes, and is rated TV-14.
Nah I liked this one. But you made a few valid points.