Having delivered horror classics with his first two times at bat, Wes Craven followed up The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes with … the made-for-TV movie Summer of Fear. Oh, well. So much for hat tricks.
Fresh from Exorcist II: The Heretic, Linda Blair stars as Rachel Bryant, just your average apple-cheeked, small-town girl who loves two things: her boyfriend, Mike (Jeff McCracken, One Man Jury), and her horse, Sundance. To that list, she’d like to add her cousin, Julia (Lee Purcell, Mr. Majestyk), who comes to live with the Bryants after the girl’s parents are killed in an auto accident, depicted through stock footage under the opening credits. According to Rachel, Julia is “kinda pretty.” Julia also kinda collects teeth.
That’s because she’s a witch, which Rachel is able to surmise through the help of their rural town’s local occult expert (Macdonald Carey, Shadow of a Doubt), not to mention all the weird shit that goes down involving Julia. For starters, Sundance flips out in her presence. And she undergoes a massive makeover from drab to dazzling — all the better to steal Mike when Rachel mysteriously awakens with gnarly blotches all over her face the morning of the big dance, not to mention a gradual seduction of her uncle (Jeremy Slate, The Centerfold Girls). And she doesn’t appear in mirrors. And hey, did I mention the teeth?
Summer of Fear is based on Lois Duncan’s young-adult novel of the same name, which may account for why the telefilm feels so watered down. It’s not as if the networks didn’t allow their features to get mean, as prime-time classics like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and Trilogy of Terror already had attested. This work’s attempts at terror are paltry at best and hysterical at worst, such as when Sundance goes bonkers during a horse show, pulling Rachel — or a stuntman in a curly wig — through so many fences and tarps that the scene wouldn’t be out of place in a Naked Gun sequel.
Although Blair is Summer’s above-the-title talent, the pic belongs to Purcell, who gives a pretty committed performance as the relative from hell. While not quite a saving grace, she impresses — and no one else does, not even Fran Drescher in a start-of-career role. How Craven got roped in to such a half-baked supernatural soufflé would be an excellent question if the answer weren’t so obvious: money. —Rod Lott
Blair Brown should have been dubbed in this-her voice sounds like Rocky the Squirrel.