Review of Summer School

Forced to stay at school during the summer, a student finds himself constantly living out horrific nightmares only to appear back in class each time as though nothing happened, and tries to find a way of ending the cycle.

This was pretty hard to get a handle on, as it's not until the very end that you realize that this is just a never-ending series of nightmares, where waking up in one puts you square in the middle of the next one. This presents some problems in the fact that there's just not a lot beyond this premise to make the film interesting and you have to rely on the creepiness of the dreams to really gather any kind of satisfaction out of the film. Granted, some of the dream segments do get pretty interesting, especially a sequence where he thinks the different attendees with him are part of a cult or a later one where the faculty is really a coven of vampires looking for easy prey and forcing him to slay them, but the brevity and the constant knowing that it's all a dream makes it really hard to get into what's going on. A novel idea and much more ingenious than a normal anthology film, but it's design gives it it's own undoing and really doesn't get much more than just above mediocre.

Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.