Summer Scars

Starring: Kevin Howarth, Darren Evans, & Amy Harvey

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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.