Night Swim (2024) We can tell you this much about 'Night Swim' from our decades of experience toiling in the home video trenches.....
.......that once this minor, weak-tea PG-13 horror was done its brief, in-and-out stay in theaters, it would've served a vital function for video rental stores......
Which is why, as a movie buyer for several chains of stores, we'd normally buy a few rental copies for each of our stores.....
Why?
A movie like this served as a vital resource for parents desperate for a milder kind of scary for their horror-hungry tweens hosting a slumber party for their friends. Or even younger kids, too.
For these concerned moms and dads, Freddy Kruger, Jason Vohrees and Michael Meyers were out.......no stabbing, chainsawing, and assorted machete-hacking allowed. Parents pleaded to video store clerks, "Do you have any horror movies my 11 year old girls can watch?"
And that's why 'Night Swim' after its swift, negligible stay at the multi-plexes, will now serve its ultimate purpose.......
......generating girlish high pitched 'eeks' as its mild collection of jump scares and halloween shop ghosts delight tween slumber parties.....and without worrying parents about subjecting their kids and their little friends to heads rolling and veins spurting.
But we're sure that the film's producers and makers had much loftier ambitions for it. After all, it rolled off the Blumhouse horror assembly line and features no less than James Wan (of the "Saw" series) as one of its co-producers.
Sorry, guys.....you'll just have to settle for the film finding its proper niche and demographic. Which shouldn't have surprised them - horror fans who fork out theater tickets expect red meat....not pink milkshakes....
We think kids might enjoy the film's revealing itself as a modern day, suburban Grimm's Fairy Tale. Its haunted swimming pool draws its water from an old notorious wishing pond it sits on top of. Families who dive in for dip win health and happiness for one of their members, but only at the cost of someone else in the fam ending up as one of the pool's creepy dead people.......
Clever enough premise and the film duly delivers all the expected shots that work on your every fear of pool zombies rising up to play Marco Polo with you. And there's at least one truly unnerving scene about a visit to a mom of one the pool's previous victims.
For R-rated horror fans, of course this one's strictly 'everyone-out-the-pool'. But for all slumber party kids and those who can only stomach Decaf scares, 3 stars (***).
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