REVIEW: ‘Summoning Sylvia’ Summons Huge Laughs-Per-Minute

Get your friends together and watch Wesley Taylor and Alex Wyse’s horror comedy Summoning Sylvia: that’s an order. There’s nothing as terrifying to a gay bachelor party-turned-summoning than a straight guy intruding. When four best friends (Travis Coles, Frankie Grande, Troy Iwata, and Noah J. Ricketts) rent a haunted house for Troy’s (Coles) bachelor party, they expect the scariest part of it to be the spirit of child-murderer Sylvia (Veanne Cox). They didn’t expect a straight brother-in-law Harrison (Nicholas Logan) to turn up and ruin all of the fun.

Summoning Sylvia is the kind of movie that knows perfectly how to trade in stereotypes and tropes to overturn your expectations and stick a fun landing. Its characters are all the typical over-the-top kind of characters you see regularly on-screen these days: a little naive, quite loud, and definitely eccentric. There’s not an ounce of sincerity in the movie. From the moment it begins and a few minutes later gives out a hilarious title screen singing “Summoning Sylvia,” you know that the exaggerated characters and their absurd scenario are meant to be laughed at and laughed with, and boy, did I laugh at and with them. This movie made me laugh out loud more times than most comedies, between snarky one-liners, self-deprecating awareness of them being caricatures, and a ridiculous spirit-summoning song.

This isn’t really a horror movie in any real way. There’s nothing scary about it or even an attempt at a jump scare. It’s more of a comedic take on the social horror where the horror isn’t really the spirit the group is trying to summon, it’s the straight guy who was accidentally invited to the gay bachelor party. It’s played out perfectly, because the performances are over the top and kitschy in the first place, the lackluster acting from the token straight just comes off as a further caricature. He has some tense beef with one of the other characters Nico (Grande) in a way that kind of dragged both of them down as characters for a spell. But he’s played by Frankie Grande, so you can expect a little melodrama, and by the time that plot thread resolves, you get over the oddity of their intensity within an otherwise very light movie.

The main twist isn’t especially novel or anything, but in the midst of a chaotic comedy, sex on the kitchen floor, sex with a ghost, and the constant wondering which twist option might come to pass, the movie lands on a sweet note and a killer musical number. Summoning Sylvia knows it’s a pure comedy through and through and so never attempts to hammer home any kind of moral. It’s perfectly satisfied with just reminding you that straight people have feelings too, even if they’re terrifying sometimes.

Summoning Sylvia is quick and to the point with more laughs per minute than the average comedy. We don’t get nearly enough good, pure comedies these days, so getting one unabashedly aware of what kind of specific humor it wants to provide is all you can ask for.

Summoning Sylvia is playing in theaters on March 31st and will be available on VOD on April 7.