Summer is a magical time when you’re young. It’s a time when anything is possible and there isn’t a worry in the world. There’s no school to be concerned about and there is a sense of freedom that you can do whatever you want. But every summer, like every childhood, must come to an end. The group of characters in Phil Price’s Summer are recent college grads looking for one last summer of freedom and care-free living before the inevitability of life takes over.

There’s really nothing original about this story and that’s fine. A coming-of-age story doesn’t need to be wholly original for it to enjoyable, but it does need to have something to draw in the viewer. Summer fails to do this even though it tries oh so very hard. It tries to draw you into the three main characters, Miller, Stefanie and Charlie (Joe Cobden, Karen Cliche, and Michael Rubenfeld) by showing us what their idea of a relaxing summer day is. These three spend their days at the community swimming pool. They bring briefcases with them and hold what they call “board meetings,” which are nothing more than them sitting around talking about life. This isn’t real. This isn’t life. Twenty-two-year old college grads, even the ones with no idea of what they want to do, don’t spend their summers at a community swimming pool.

Sure, these kids drink a lot and go out to clubs and stuff, but their lives just don’t ring true. So when the drama hit and they had to make important life decisions, I simply didn’t care about them or what road they took.

This whole film was like watching something made by a film school student. I understand the budget was low and that’s fine, but there was zero creativity in the filmmaking. Low budgets don’t have to mean there cannot be creativity. Watching Summer, I got the impression that these guys were saying to themselves, “Hey, we’ve got a screenplay and it’s about real people and real things and it’s a great commentary on life so let’s make it into a movie.” If only it were that easy to make a good movie.

There was one incongruous bit where the group went on a trip up “north.” Instead of showing us footage of them traveling, it turned into a cartoon of their road trip for about a minute. I’m sorry, but this isn’t a Savage Steve Holland movie. It didn’t work.

One other thing really annoyed me about this film. There are multiple references to John Hughes films, including at least two references to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. These references were silly as they had nothing to do with the story and Hughes would surely laugh at how bad this movie is. Even Curly Sue and the Beethoven movies are better than this.

At least there was a fat kid at the swimming pool. Fat kids at swimming pools are good for a half-pant bump in the DVD rating. It’s too bad there wasn’t much else going for this film.

Video
It looks pretty bad, actually. Yes, this is a low-budget film, but Ardustry certainly could have done better with this DVD. To start, it’s a single layer DVD, which wouldn’t have necessarily been a bad thing if not for the fact that they chose to go with a non-anamorphic widescreen presentation. If you’re going to go with a single layer disc, why waste a good bit of what little space you have by making it non-anamorphic with its superfluous black bars? Very stupid. This isn’t 1998 so I don’t understand how some of these minor studios keep doing stuff like this. I wouldn’t expect a movie like this to look good in the first place, but making decisions like that only exacerbates the problem. As a result, we’re left with a DVD with a fuzzy and dull picture. What were they thinking?

Audio
Similar to the video, they made a big mistake here as well. This isn’t a high fidelity film to begin with so there’s very little benefit to including a Dolby 5.1 audio track. But if they were going to do that, why did they bother including a 2.0 track as well? Just more wasted space on this disc. What I did hear was intelligible and the music sounded fine, but they should have dropped one of the audio tracks to improve the video a bit.

Ardustry should also be ashamed of itself for not including English closed captions or subtitles. Not that I would recommend this title to my deaf stepbrother anyway, but how hard would it have been to include one of these options?

Extra Features
Nothing. And I can’t say I’m disappointed by that in the least. I really didn’t need to learn anything else about this little film.

Packaging
It’s a standard case with pretty standard cover art. They did do a solid job of making the girl look nice for the cover, but nothing else is of note. There is no insert included.

Parting Words
Summer was pretty much a waste of my time. It took itself way too seriously for a film about young people looking to maintain a hold on their carefree lives. It’s purported to be a comedy, but I only laughed out loud one time during the whole viewing. Yes, it’s obviously trying to be a little more than just a standard post-college comedy, but the characters simply weren’t interesting enough for me to care about the drama in their lives. The DVD is also of sub-par quality so I would have extreme difficulty recommending this title even if it were available at a quarter of its $19.99 list price. Avoid this title unless you have nothing else to do with your life.