Customer Reviews

The Pool [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This movie is all too typical of the slasher film, and evidence that film makers in Germany/Czechoslovakia have no more creativity than our own American ilk. With copious accents, Heineken advertisements and the typical "coming of age meets coming of death" plot, plodding through THE POOL is an exercise in pleading.

The movie starts with your typical SCREAM beginning: girl chats on phone whilst making dinner, gets a spooky call, runs outside, finds her boyfriend dead, and then dies herself. To make matters worse, the killer looks like a reject from Saturday Night Live's "Sprockets" ("now is the time on Sprockets WHERE WE KILL!"). Cue the Dawson's Creek / Felicity soft rock, and we're going down hill within the first five minutes. From there, we follow our cast as they stage an illegal party at the local pool resort.

There are some relatively decent aspects as the movie is expertly filmed with good scenery (it is Europe after all) and some slight twists on expectations: instead of the opening fodder grabbing a knife, she attempts a shotgun, instead of one car playing [bad] music, an envoy of student vehicles engage in synchronizing [awfulness], and instead of using CDs, these supposed "rich kids" use cassettes.

Deaths are nothing too inventive, but two in particular "succeed" visually: the death of the poor girl, Kim (Isla Fisher), is held a bit longer than you'd expect, and the vent killing of Martin (Jason Liggett) is decently conveyed by blood running down his hands as its clenched by a helpful Sarah. The most inventive scene is spoiled before the movie even starts - "knife to water sliding female crotch" is the DVD's flipping menu intro, for God's sake.

With no nudity besides a quick flashing, the standard "heroine overcomes her fear" sub-plot resolves, and the remaining survivors create a love triangle of "you cheated on my boyfriend, but it's ok because WE'RE ALIVE!". The most telling aspect of THE POOL is a line at the end of the movie, "I know what you did last summer...", whose only decent viewer response is "yer goddamn right!".

The 16:9 widescreen DVD includes "Behind the Scenes" (10:37, consisting of clips from the movie, mini-interviews, shots of the water slide kill, etc.), a photo gallery (30 images), filmographies of the directory and cast, Spanish subtitles, and the expected trailer (1:17, Voice over: "It was their last day of term. When you've been there, done that, you need somewhere special to go... but it's about to become a night they'll never forget... because someone is watching, waiting, and ready... to KILL! Now, the only way to stay alive, is to follow the rules." On screen: "Now Running. No Diving. No Splashing. Welcome to the Deep End.").

The characters in this movie are just so annoying and many of them are terribly dubbed. TERRIBLY!! This is like a MENTOS commercial that turns into a slasher movie. The majority of the performers are obviously european and trying to act very American even with their silly dubbed voices. The effort to seem like randy college students is probably the most overdone and surreal try ever to grace any film. It is just ATROCIOUS!! The women are mean, the men are stupidly oversexed and they bop their heads up and down to rock music while drinking and driving and the like. Not that college students don't act that way but in this film it really comes off and more or less like some of the character Lulu's antics in John Waters' POLYESTER. Like getting overexcited to the point of absurdity by the mere thought of liquor or.... This movie wins the prize for leaving the viewer with absolutely no empathy for any of the characters until they start to get killed. If I knew any of these people, I would hate them and be very glad that they had passed on, to put it mildly.
Somewhere along the way the characters become much less annoying and the way they are dispatched is definately some of the more original teen slasher deaths in memory. It does make too much use of the cutaway, meaning you get the idea but you don't usually get to see any actual body penetration.
The killer looks like a cross between the SCREAM ghost mask and the PUNISHER character from MARVEL comics.

This movie is actually fun but you have to wait a good 50 minutes before you actually begin to just give up.

I love slasher films and will forever love slasher films, but there are some that you want to remember a little more than others. My case in point "sleepaway camp " classic and gets better more times you watch it but "the pool" on the other hand of which this is true not the worst of the slasher genre but far from the best in the crop of so many horror titles having a mask wearing pyscho.The acting not all that bad but the plot drags so much you find yourself wanting to fast forward to when the good stuff starts.This feels like any movie you have seen a 100 times before it's way to predictable and the character development is terrible even for a slasher film .It does have one memorable killing on the covered water slide but other then that not much going on here that has not been done to death and fails miserably!If this would have taken place at a public pool not even the lifeguard would have wanted to save this dud of a slasher!

This is the typical B grade slasher pic that rips off Friday The 13th. It's basicly putting Jason Voorhees (A guy in a mask with a machette knife) into a situation where he can slaughter a bunch of college grads who have broken into a rec centre for the graduation party.

The acting is mostly terrible, the scares are stupid, the horror is not there, and the chill factor is in the minus 10 area. About the only kill in the movie that was any good was one of the kids coming down a water slide...but it didnt show anything memorable for the effect to work to its maximum potentiol.

Ya might wanna rent it to laugh at how bad it is, but otherwise, dont bother with it, you're not missing anything special.

I don't know what bothered me the most with this film was it the annoying pop punk soundtrack or the fact that the script was written by a monkey. The pool could be one of the most dreadful slaher films of all time, it was just to awful and I just can't believe anyone could give this a positive review right here on amazon. Well I was deffinently tricked into believing that this film might by good and have a lot of gory death scenes but I was mistaken, once you get through all the sh** acting then you will find what resembles a storyline involving some foriegn teens who just graduated from highschool and have decided to celebrate by having a pool party so they get slaughtered by what seems like the most pathetic looking killer I have ever seen the death scenes weren't that good either so there was nothing else that I could look forward to. So I suggest you avoid this unless you like watching crap like I know what you did last summer heck even that film wasn't this bad.

Within the first 10 minutes the main characters reveal themselves as being so obnoxious that you find yourself thinking the only enjoyment you will get in this flick is that of watching them meet their fate. The horror component of this movie is so watered down and politically correct that it will only appeal to 12 y.o. viewers (people who can not legally watch it due to its rating). I must confess that I enjoy a good B-grade horror movie, but this just does not deliver on any level. This one leaves me wishing for the horror movies of the 70s, where they took risks and were prepared to show something. In this case you sit through a teen soap opera and see very little by way of credible horror. OK, so I did watch the movie all the way through, but overall this is one of the worst horror flicks of recent times. Simply unredeemable and never worth watching again.

If you already know the movies : Friday the 13th,Halloween,Scream and the thousand others that have been released since 1980, well just forget about The Pool ! There is nothing New in this movie.The story could have been written on a Postal stamp so much there is nothing to say about it.The teenagers are like usual, idiots listening typical Punk Rock music.The plot ... Is there one in it ? The (BAD) actors are killed one by one and the final survivors even if all their friends have been sliced few minutes before,they still smile and make bad jokes at the end.Avoid this movie ! Just re-watch one of the old flicks,they are funnier or at least a bit creepy.

This movie has the most clichés of any horror film I have seen, but here are some thoughts to consider:

1. The pool setting, Prague, and cinematography are all great! Even the acting is good. You can sit there and play identify the accent since it is difficult enough to tell the actors apart having no variety in outfits, hair color, or race to help us out.

2. They don't get killed unaware of what is going on, there is a struggle for survival that makes it all fun and exciting to watch.

3. You can spot the incongrueties with reality and ponder such questions as "Are there no umrella in the Czech Republic?", "How can he not climb into a vent 6 feet of the ground?", and so many more.

4. Some great death scenes worth seeing involving air vents, water slides, and bathroom stalls. Many tributes to classics such as Scream, Aliens, the Poseidon Adventure, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and so on. And it is not predictable, I challenge anyone to identify who will die in the movie before hand (and not 2 minutes before they bite it).

If they had someone rework the script for the clichés and incongrueties, this could have been a classic. Knowing what you are getting into before hand, this is still worth watching as an exciting slasher (they know they are trapped and in danger, unlike many slashers where only the lead ever figures it out and the rest get killed walking aimlessly around the house) or a game with friends in the evening as you explain why each scene makes no sense (it is not always blatant or easily spotted).

One of the most boring horrorflicks ever. All the actors are much too old and much too untalented. The plot is just a joke, the entire film is completely redundant.

I bought this one because my cousin is in it, top-billed and the only American, no less. It was shot on location in Czechoslovakia and has a lot of Germans on both sides of the camera. There are a few nice shots of beautiful downtown Prague; but otherwise it is indistinguishable from a hundred other "mad-slasher" (or, in Roger Ebert's terminology, "dead-teenager") movies.

A bunch of students at the so-called "International High School of Prague" decide to spend the night after final exams at a huge swimming pool-spa complex (Aquapark Babylon Centrum in Liberec, CZ, according to the credits: looks like a fun place), where they are picked off one-by-one by the inevitable bad guy, this time in skin-tight black and a white skull mask, wielding a machete.

You haven't seen so many "wandering-down-endless-corridor" tracking shots since "The Terror" with Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson (1963). Other theme ripoffs include crawling through ventilation ducts ("Aliens"), and stabbing through the walls of enclosed spaces ("Terminator II"). I'm not an expert on this genre, but I'm pretty sure all the traditional mad-slasher-movie cliches are repeated here as well. Even the obligatory bumbling police inspector makes his appearance.

Heineken's beer is apparently very popular in Prague (they get a promo credit at the end), and everybody except my cousin smokes like crazy.

The bad guy is ultimately revealed to be--surprise!--one of their own group, and naturally he turns out to be very hard to get rid of. My cousin kicks him in the privates, throws liquor bottles at him, sets him on fire, and cuts his throat with a broken Smirnoff bottle; and after all that, he still has to be shot. Eat your heart out, Sigourney Weaver....

The DVD case promises "brief sexuality/nudity," but it turns out to be very brief. One of the minor female characters flashes, "Girls Gone Wild" style, for about 1.5 seconds. (I was hoping for at least some good steam-bath scenes.) Don't get it for the nudity.

"The Pool" is not a serious contender for any major awards. On the other hand, as I told my cousin, this is where Jamie Lee Curtis got her start.

Gets two stars only because my cousin is the star.