Starring Kristen Miller, Elena Uhlig, Thorston Grassoff, Isla Fisher

Directed by Boris von Sychowski

If you're one of the many people like me that can't stand such crappy Hollywood slasher films like Valentine, the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise, and the Urban Legend crapfests, you'll be interested to know that it isn't just Hollywood. The Czech Republic isn't that much better at it either. Actually, I think this film is a US/German co-production filmed on location in Prague and Czechoslovakia. The first sign of trouble for this film is its title - The Pool; sort of the equivalent of Friday the 13th having been called The Camp. Could the title be any more generic? Could this film be any more generic? Despite having better production values than your typical direct-to-video slasher film, The Pool still plays out more like one of the lesser slasher films of the early 80s. It's also loaded with cliches galore and is about as smart as Anna Nicole Smith after a lobotomy. Don't believe me? Read the next paragraph and decide for yourself.

An attractive young woman is at home alone in a fancy house, preparing a romantic dinner for two as she awaits her boyfriend's arrival. It is nighttime and, what a shock, there's a thunderstorm. We see a car pull up in the driveway. Moments later, the doorbell rings. She answers the door, but nobody is there so she does what anyone would do in this situation, she stands there calling out her boyfriend's name and yells about this not being funny for what seems like an eternity. Then she spots his car in the driveway and approaches it, thus leaving the front door wide open, to see her boyfriend sitting in the front seat with his throat cut. She screams, runs back into the house, and begins fumbling with the keys required to lock the fancy front door. After locking the door, she runs to grab her cell phone and leaves the keys in the lock in the process. The phone is dead. She runs upstairs to use the house phone up there, but in her panic, she ends up knocking the phone over the banister and crashing to the floor below. Just then, the lights go out. She gets a shotgun out of the gun case and heads downstairs to the front door, but the keys are gone and now she's locked in. Who the hell owns a house where you need a key to unlock the front door from the inside? I've never heard of such a thing in my life. So, does she just blow the friggin' lock off the door with her shotgun and get the hell out of there? Of course not, that would be the smart thing to do. Instead, she begins cautiously walking around the house with the gun. As she walks up to the sliding glass backdoors, she sees the skeletal face of a masked figure standing just outside looking right at her. She immediately fires two shots at him. Apparently, the laws of physics and the rules of a stupid horror movie don't go well together because despite the fact that she just shot this guy who was just standing there motionless twice at point blank range, the bullets completely missed. As she fumbles to reload, the masked slasher crashes through what's left of the glass door armed with a big machete, kills her, and finally tosses her dead body into the swimming pool. This is the first 5 minutes or so of The Fool and it definitely sets a tone for the formulaic slasher tale to come.

The only thing that sets The Pool apart from, let's say, Valentine, is that it's set in Europe with a predominantly European cast that speak fluent English but with a variety of accents. Set at the International High School of Prague (i.e. rich kids boarding school) on the last day of school, a group of one-dimensional teens, who all look to be in their late 20s, embark on their annual end of school party held at a secret location. In this case, they break into this posh spa after hours that boasts a humongous Roman bath (which I suppose is the pool that the film is named after), a waterslide, a hot tub, and a weight room. Sex, booze, and mass murder follows. There's also a side story about a cop trying to find the secret location of the party for reasons I won't reveal.

Acting wise, most everyone does a decent job considering the horrid script; everyone save for the guy playing the heroine's boyfriend, a chain smoking, Eurotrash, Peter Facinelli look-a-like. He comes across like the French guy that was always trying to steal Woody's girlfriend on Cheers. In fact, the only character I did like was the mousy redhead played by Isla Fisher who is the only one willing to call out these spoiled, self absorbed, rich kids for what they really are. In many slasher movies, this character would be the film's lead heroine. In this film however, she gets a machete through the gut about 15 minute in.

And like I said, the cliché-ridden script is horrid. There's also one thing that I had to play back more than once to determine whether or not I actually heard them correctly because its one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. The killer has locked them inside the building. In fact, he's locked it up airtight. Not only do they have to escape the building because there's a killer picking them off, they have to do so in a certain amount of time because he's cut off the ventilation system and they'll all eventually suffocate in a few hours. And they can't just bust a window because they're all made from reinforced plexiglass. Say what? What the hell are they in - a pool/spa or the freakin' biodome? Yes, they actually end up having to pull a Bruce Willis and crawl around through the building's ventilation shafts at one point while the killer stabs at them from below with his big knife. This is the only scene in the film that could have had actually suspense if not for the sheer absurdity of how it all plays out. Oh, did I neglect to mention that the heroine of the film, the one who is attending a pool party, is deathly afraid of water and the big moment in the film where she had to confront this fear by diving in is shot in super slow motion? Dumb and lame!

As for the killer himself, he's dressed like the killer from Prom Night but wearing a skull-like mask and wielding Jason's machete. And this particular slasher drives a Toyota. He's not a supernatural maniac but he does seem to be psychic since he always knows exactly where someone is and where they're going. In addition, he seems to develop the power of teleportation at one point in the film. His methods of killing are your generic slash and stab except for the film's only inventive kill in which one unlucky girl on the waterslide gets split up the middle sliding right into the waiting machete. The revelation of the killer's identity is especially lame and his motivations are even lamer. Essentially, he's a homicidal misogynist who dresses up like the villain in a European comic book.

I'm sure there are some slasher fans that will enjoy The Pool for its retro style of doing things in the post-Scream era. Truthfully, this is the kind of slasher flick that pretty much killed off the genre for quite some time until Scream came along. Even with slick production values and an international flavor, The Pool is still just another routine entry in the, as Roger Ebert calls it, "dead teenager" genre. Sure, it's a slickly produced "dead teenager" film, but the best thing I can say is that at least it wasn't as insulting to the intelligence as I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.

1 ½ STARS