Connect with us

Movie Reviews

‘Night Swim’ Review: Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon Struggle to Keep Low-Rent Horror Flick Afloat

Published

on

‘Night Swim’ Review: Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon Struggle to Keep Low-Rent Horror Flick Afloat

Unless you don’t know how to swim, swimming pools simply aren’t scary. Sure, some of them can be pretty gross, depending on how well their owners maintain them. And if bugs or other creatures die in them, that can be disgusting. But mostly they seem like a nice place to relax on a warm summer day. That’s the main problem with Bryce McGuire’s feature about a haunted swimming pool, adapted from a 2014 short film he made in collaboration with Rod Blackhurst. Despite the filmmaker’s best efforts to drum up suspense via the usual jump scares, Night Swim turns out to be just as silly as it sounds.  

The short that provided this film’s inspiration had a running time of under four minutes, which sounds exactly right. Unfortunately, the feature version runs 98 minutes, its simple premise gussied up with a backstory mythology that isn’t likely to make Stephen King green with envy. And when the most chilling line in a movie is “There’s something wrong with that pool!” it’s all too easy to imagine the barbs on a future episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Night Swim

The Bottom Line

The shallow end of the horror-film pool.

Advertisement

Release date: Friday, Jan. 5
Cast: Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amelie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren, Jodi Long
Director-screenwriter: Bryce McGuire

Rated PG-13,
1 hour 38 minutes

The story begins with a prologue set in 1992 when a little girl attempts to retrieve a mysterious toy boat from her backyard swimming pool and meets an unfortunate end. Cut to the present day, when we’re introduced to the Waller family: Ray (Wyatt Russell), a former baseball player whose career was cut short by multiple sclerosis; his supportive wife, Eve (Oscar nominee Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin); teenage daughter Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes); and 12-year old son Elliot (Gavin Warren, Fear the Walking Dead), who hasn’t inherited his father’s athletic ability.

The family, unaware of the house’s fateful history, makes the mistake of buying the home with the pool, with Ray believing that daily water therapy will help him counteract the effects of his pernicious disease. (This, despite the fact that the first time he sees it he falls in and nearly drowns.) It also turns out the pool has water provided by a natural spring thought to have healing properties, which indeed seems to be the case as Ray’s condition miraculously improves.  

Advertisement

Cue the inevitable disturbing incidents, as the family members prove weirdly determined to stick their hands in every available opening in the pool with predictably unhappy results. Only their pet cat seems to know something is wrong with the pool — the animals in horror films are always smarter than the humans — but not surprisingly it soon turns up missing, its leash floating in the water.

The film attempts to do for swimming pools what Jaws did for the ocean, with Marco Polo and other pool party games suddenly turning sinister and potentially deadly. Except Jaws had a genuinely terrifying monster in the form of a great white shark, while Night Swim has fleetingly glimpsed supernatural creatures of the kind you might see when you get too much chlorine in your eyes. And when they do become more visible as the story goes on, they look like waterlogged Halloween masks.

Swimming pools don’t get haunted without a reason, of course. The one eventually revealed here turns out to be a doozy, dating back generations, having something to do with a demonic wishing well. By the time one of the main characters becomes possessed by whatever is haunting the pool, the film has thoroughly devolved into campiness.

To their credit, the actors elevate the material. Russell, son of Kurt, has clearly inherited his father’s innate relaxed appeal; Condon, in a film that’s frankly beneath her, invests her portrayal with surprising depth; and Hoeferle and Warren are thoroughly natural as the beleaguered kids. And director McGuire, whose previous feature credit is 2018’s Unfollowed, proves more than adept at adhering to the Blumhouse low-budget horror film playbook. But for all their efforts, Night Swim won’t make you think twice about jumping into a pool on a hot summer night.  

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Movie Reviews

I Know Exactly How You Die – Review | Indie Slasher | Heaven of Horror

Published

on

I Know Exactly How You Die – Review | Indie Slasher | Heaven of Horror

Watch I Know Exactly How I Die on VOD

The director of I Know Exactly How I Die is Alexandra Spieth, who ensures a tight pace and some gorgeous shots. She previously directed Stag and created and starred in the web-series [Blank] My Life. The screenplay comes from Mike Corey, and I do really like the plot and evolution of this story.

As already mentioned, the star Rushabh Patel is the executive producer. As a result, this movie is billed as “Rushabh Patel’s I Know Exactly How I Die“, which I am not a fan of. Unless Rushabh Patel is famous in ways I am not familiar with – nor is IMDb, as this is his first and so far only credit there.

This is like people wondering if Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is connected to Stranger Things, because the media keeps referring to it as a new show from The Duffer Brothers. Sure, they produced it, but Haley Z. Boston created the original story and wrote the screenplay. And she’s not even a newcomer.

Okay, rant over, but I just don’t understand the marketing and press decisions of it all.

Anyway, as already mentioned, the practical effects in I Know Exactly How I Die are gorgeous. Any slasher fan should enjoy the concept of the plot as well as those amazing practical effects. And yet, you will have to endure a little terrible CGI, but this is an indie production, so budget restraints come into play. Of course, so does choosing the best talent, and that did not happen for CGI here!

Advertisement

I Know Exactly How You Die is out on VOD from April 7, 2026. You can rent it on Digital HD from your preferred platform, including Prime Video and Fandango at Home. The film will also be available on DVD.

Continue Reading

Movie Reviews

‘Super Mario’ fans ignore weak reviews and send sequel to $372.5 million global box office debut, biggest opening of the year for a studio film | Fortune

Published

on

‘Super Mario’ fans ignore weak reviews and send sequel to 2.5 million global box office debut, biggest opening of the year for a studio film | Fortune

Mixed reviews didn’t dissuade mass audiences from buying tickets to the “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” which scored the biggest opening of the year for a Hollywood movie. The Illumination and Nintendo co-production earned $130.9 million over the weekend and a massive $190.1 million in its first five days in North American theaters, according to studio estimates Sunday.

Universal Pictures released the sequel globally on Wednesday, capitalizing on kids’ spring break vacations in the week leading up to the Easter holiday. With an estimated $182.4 million from 80 overseas markets, the film is looking at an astronomical $372.5 million debut — the latest hit for the PG rating. Mexico is leading the international bunch with $29.1 million from 5,136 screens, followed by the U.K. and Ireland with $19.7 million.

The animated sequel, Illumination CEO Christopher Meledandri’s 16th movie in 16 years, is the industry’s biggest debut since “Avatar: Fire and Ash” launched over Christmas. The Chinese movie “Pegasus 3,” which was not a Motion Picture Association release, has the slight edge for the 2026 global record, however.

It’s also a dip from the first film, which opened to $204 million domestically during the same five-day time frame in 2023 ($147 of that was from Friday, Saturday and Sunday). “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” went on to be the second biggest movie of 2023, with over $1.3 billion in box office receipts.

“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” which features returning voice actors Chris Pratt, Jack Black, Anya Taylor-Joy and Charlie Day, had a massive footprint in the U.S. and Canada, where it played in 4,252 theaters, including 421 IMAX and 1,345 premium large format screens. It made $15 million from the IMAX screens alone.

Advertisement

“It’s exactly the kind of broad, crowd-pleasing release that brings people into theatres,” AMC Chairman and CEO Adam Aron said in a statement.

It also cost around $110 million to make, not including marketing and promotion expenses. But it arrived on a wave of less-than-stellar reviews. Its Rotten Tomatoes score is currently sitting at a lousy 40%. Ticket buyers were more enthusiastic, however.

The family audience gave the movie five out of five stars according to PostTrak exit polls, while general audiences gave it four stars and an A- on CinemsScore. Audiences skewed male (61%) overall, although when it came to families attending there were slightly more moms (52%) than dads.

“These kind of audience reaction scores just point to a ridiculously strong run, not only throughout the spring, but likely into the summer as well,” said Jim Orr, Universal’s president of domestic distribution.

“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” will open in Japan later this month.

Advertisement

Last year, the first weekend in April hosted the launch of another video game blockbuster, “A Minecraft Movie,” which had a bigger three-day debut ($162.8 million) but didn’t have a “Project Hail Mary” in a strong second place, meaning the weekend overall is still up around 5%.

As expected, “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” ended the two-week reignof the Ryan Gosling-led sci-fi hit “Project Hail Mary,” which landed in second its third weekend in theaters where it added $30.7 million, bringing its running domestic total to $217.2 million. Worldwide, it’s made $420.7 million to date.

Third place went to A24’s provocative new movie “The Drama,” starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, which made an estimated $14.4 million from 3,087 theaters. The film’s stars have been on a massive and charming press blitz to promote their R-rated movie about a engaged couple grappling with an unnerving revelation, which cost a reported $28 million to produce. The reveal has drummed up a fair amount of cultural discourse. While reviews have been more positive than not (82% on Rotten Tomatoes), it got a less promising B CinemaScore.

“Hoppers” and “Reminders of Him” rounded out the top five. And the box office outlook looks bright overall, up around 30% from last year.

“There’s no better opening act for a great summer than a huge month of April powered by a mega blockbuster like the ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,’” said Paul Dergarabedian, comscore’s head of marketplace trends.

Advertisement

Top 10 movies by domestic box office

With final domestic figures being released Monday, this list factors in the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore:

1.“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” $130.9 million.

2.“Project Hail Mary,” $30.7 million.

3.“The Drama,” $14.4 million.

4.“Hoppers,” $5.8 million.

Advertisement

5.“Reminders of Him,” $2.2 million.

6.“A Great Awakening,” $2.1 million.

7.“They Will Kill You,” $1.9 million.

8.“Dhurandhar The Revenge,” $1.9 million.

9.“Ready or Not 2: Here I Come,” $1.8 million.

Advertisement

10.“Scream 7,” 915,000.

Continue Reading

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: THE YETI

Published

on

Movie Review: THE YETI
Rating: R Stars: Brittany Allen, Eric Nelsen, Jim Cummings, Christina Bennett Lind, Gene Gallerano, Linc Hand, Elizabeth Cappuccino, William Sadler, Corbin Bernsen Writers: Gene Gallerano & William Pisciotta Directors: Gene Gallerano & William Pisciotta Distributor: Well Go USA Entertainment Release Date: April 4, 2026 and April 8, 2026 (AMC theatrical); April 10, 2026 (digital) Written and directed by the team of Gene Gallerano & William Pisciotta, THE YETI is set in the ‘40s and aspires to look as though it was made in the ‘50s. Its style seems to be part of its reason for being. It’s agreeable as a […]Read On »
Continue Reading

Trending