Someone here has already compared this to Ready Player One and I think that's a pretty apt comparison. This movie's idea of recreating nostalgia involves nothing more than a lot of name-dropping and going down a sterile checklist of 80's tropes without seeming to really understand any of them.
We've got a retrowave soundtrack that wants to be an homage to the 80's, but doesn't have an authentic feel to it at all. A nerdy kid that looks almost exactly like ones we used to see cast in the 80's and an edgy semi-punk kid that looks as much like young River Phoenix as possible and etc etc, but neither they or any of the other cast have any charisma whatsoever. There's also a badly done montage, an unbelievably cringey romance subplot, a plot we've seen many, many times before, and much more that's all ripped directly from 80's movies/shows, but it never actually manages to properly capture that 80's spirit and just feels like a desperate, hollow attempt to copy familiar things without any real thought put into it.
I really don't see what there is to like here. The kids mostly sit around constantly name-dropping 80's movies, talk about jerking off a lot, and then act really weirdly excited that there's a serial killer targeting boys their age nearby. None of it's funny or interesting or at all authentic.
Maybe the comparison to Stranger Things is already overdone, but it's still very valid. The kids in Stranger Things have all the charisma and acting talent that these ones don't and they live in a world that has a quality retro atmosphere to it that doesn't rely entirely on making a bunch of lazy retro references. Stranger Things also has its characters surprise you by playing against perceived stereotypes, whereas this just has everyone diving headfirst into being a complete cliche and not even doing that well. Hell, even something like The Guest felt vastly more well done and authentically 80's than this and it doesn't even actually take place in the 80's.
There's not really a nice way to say it, but this really is one for the Ready Player One crowd who don't even really care about characters or story quality, as long as someone sits there and reads a list of names of 80's movies and shows to hit their nostalgia hair-trigger.
