“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the pool… it’s Death Pool: The Pool that Eats”. Or, you know, just good ‘ol Night Swim (a movie about a death pool). Not since Unbreakable and Lethal Weapon has a pool cover been so evil! Yes, it’s January horror… but not as bad as I expected.

Night Swim is about a family that moves into a new house with one of them there killer swimming pools the realtors try to keep mum. Soon the husband is starting to feel better as the pool farts around trying to decide when enough runtime has passed to reveal its real evil game.

Yeah, only so much you can do with an evil pool that’s evil. The film repeats those things often enough you’d think they thought we slipped and hit our head on the edge of the pool and sank to the bottom. Some of these pool-related scares actually kind of work… other times they just go on too long and aren’t scary.

In some ways, this film’s overall structure – which is a little shaggy and involves a lot of time outside the pool hanging with the family – reminds me a bit of an old themed Stephen King story. You know, the old days when cars, laundry presses, St Bernard’s, and other hauntable things were haunted. This is both good and bad because, unless you like these thinly written characters, it’ll just be monotonous drivel before we get back to the big wet monster in the backyard.

But I kind of didn’t hate this movie. It has some effective scares and it does some decent work with the characters. It should have been even shorter than its 90 minutes… but it stretches just far enough without completely snapping.

I’m giving it decent ranking but it’s by a pretty slim margin. I had it at a more skeptical number for awhile but I walked out of the theater feeling better about the movie than worse. And that’s a big ask for a January horror flick about killer water.

Score: 76