Summer Scars

Total load of garbage! A film with no real suspense or plotline, disguised as a so called "horror"....will have your jaw dropping to the floor, not from shock or screaming....but rather from yawning.

This confrontational coming-of-age thriller is a haunting look into the destruction of innocence and the depths of fear. When a gang of raucous teens plays hooky in the woods, they cross paths with a mysterious drifter. Preying on their adolescent curiosity and naivete, the sadistic vagabond easily wins them over only to inflict humiliating and torturous mind games with a rusty switchblade and a gun. Trembling and desperate, these kids realize that their only chance of survival is to embrace the darkness within and fight back with some wicked games of their own.

Six fourteen year old kids skip school to play in the woods, but some hot rodding on a stolen moped changes the fate of their day. The latest popular horror film genre which has exploited youth terror, is nicely flipped on its head in this film from a bunch of tear aways causing terror and mayhem in a wood to a young couple in the way of the bigger budget 'Eden Lake', to the adults getting their own back, with terror inflicted on themselves, in the manner of a drifter actor Kevin Howarth, in 'Summer Scars'. Summer Scars has been tipped as a mixture of 'Stand by Me' and 'Eden Lake' and although not up to those to films standards, it is an easy comparison. The film is low key and generally not that thrilling. The film does though have good performances from its leads and doesn't out stay its welcome with a running time just under and hour and twenty minutes.

For an ultra low budget movie this is very watchable. has more tension and drama than most Hollywood films in it's short running time

Distinguishes itself from an overcrowded field (or forest) by staying clear of the supernatural, and casting a few years younger than the horny nincompoops who usually do the huffing and puffing in these things; these kids are all too credibly taken in by the stranger in the midst, and the flickers of innocence in their interactions with one another make them more sympathetic and rounded than they might have been. At barely an hour, it's a drop in the ocean - one half of what used to be a double-feature, back in the day - but a proficient one, avoiding undue flippancy in its treatment of a major contemporary concern; it does, however, get tawdry indeed with its final round of trouser-dropping, and oddly redolent of what the Children's Film Foundation might have produced under the directorship of Aleister Crowley.

I think it could've been a lot better...A lot more suspenseful, a lot more dramatic and and lot more psychological. There was no real shock factor found in other such films. Saying that though, the acting was pretty good and the story was there, just could've been developed more I think.

When a group of friends in Wales decide to cut school and hang out in the woods, they meet a drifter who will change their lives in the shocking true story, Summer Scars. Writer/Director Julian Richards claims that this actually happened to him as a child. At 67 minutes long, this is one of the shortest films you will ever see and still it felt like it was too long. What happened was unique and defiantly worthy of a film, but it seems to me like Richards decided to tell the entire truth of what happened in painstaking detail. What this film needed was some fiction thrown in to make the story more interesting and to space out the events of what happened. As for the cast, it was almost completely full of newcomers, some of which were horrible, but others like Darren Evans, showed some real skill and a bright future. The only veteran actor was Kevin Howarth, who played the drifter and he was terrific. The veteran horror actor really showed us in a short period of time, what this guy must have really been like and he was really amazing. It's the performances of Howarth and Evans that make this short, creepy film worth watching. Summer Scars was an interesting story, but jumped around so much and had a hard time finding direction. For long periods of time nothing happens, but when it finally does, it comes at you so quickly that you're just confused. I liked this film, but with the story they had to go with, if they had had a better cast, and spread things out a little more, Summer Scars could have been so much more than it was.

Six fourteen year old kids skip school to play in the woods, but some hot rodding on a stolen moped changes the fate of their day. The latest popular horror film genre which has exploited youth terror, is nicely flipped on its head in this film from a bunch of tear aways causing terror and mayhem in a wood to a young couple in the way of the bigger budget 'Eden Lake', to the adults getting their own back, with terror inflicted on themselves, in the manner of a drifter actor Kevin Howarth, in 'Summer Scars'. Summer Scars has been tipped as a mixture of 'Stand by Me' and 'Eden Lake' and although not up to those to films standards, it is an easy comparison. The film is low key and generally not that thrilling. The film does though have good performances from its leads and doesn't out stay its welcome with a running time just under and hour and twenty minutes.

Not bad... thoroughly unbelievable though and not scary/upsetting/disturbing in any way...

was a bit of a letdown since reading what the flick was about, gave me some huge expectations of some crazy shit and ended up getting just a tease of what i was expecting.