Cruel Summer is a 2016 British horror/thriller film.
Autistic teen Danny Evans goes alone on a camping trip in order to earn his Duke of Edinburgh award. However, a trio of delinquents pursue him to exact revenge for a perceived slight against one of them.
Has nothing to do with the Bananarama or Taylor Swift songs of the same name, or the TV series.
Tropes in this movie include:
- Disproportionate Retribution: Nick decides to make Danny pay (and ultimately tortures and murders him) for allegedly sleeping with his ex before he even dated her.
- Downer Ending: Danny is horrifically tortured and murdered by Nick and Julia. Calvin, who only went along with the plan because he was told they were going after a rapist pedophile, gets five years in prison.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Julia. She goes along with Nick's lie to Calvin about Danny being a rapist pedophile, but once Nick starts taking things too far, she quickly starts breaking down.
- Hate Sink: There's absolutely nothing likable about Nick. He's a short-tempered asshole who isn't above exploiting a female friend's crush on him, and lying to another friend in order to get them to do what he wants. He's also implied to have been an abusive boyfriend, and by the end of the movie he's become a depraved, murderous sociopath.
- Initiation Ceremony: Of the "humiliating" variety. Before torturing him, Nick forces Danny to strip naked as part of a fake "initiation" into their friend group.
- Pædo Hunt: What Calvin thinks they’re on, though it’s an aversion, as Danny is not really a pedophile.
- Teens Are Monsters: Nick, and to a lesser extent Julia. Calvin is a subversion as he only goes along with the other two because he believes Danny to be a pedophile.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The film is marketed as being "inspired by true events," but the specific incident shown in the film did not actually happen, and the characters are all fictional. It was actually based on a wave of stabbings happening in Britain around the time the movie was made, and the plot also has some similarities to the murder of Craig Sorger
in the United States while Danny's murder itself is most similar to the murder of Terry Hurst who was similarly hacked to death by scythes while camping, with one left in his head, just like Danny's tragic fate, but unlike the film, Hurst was actually "friends" with his attackers and they were all camping together instead of hunting a stranger based on a lie and all three received life in prison instead of only the main aggressor.
