31 Days of Asian Horror: The Pool (2018)

It’s Creature Feature Friday and today’s pick had been sitting in my Shudder list for a bit too long. Written and directed by Ping Lumpraploeng, The Pool follows Day (Ken Theeradeth Wongpuapan), who was working on a film set using a pool. He stays after to clean up the set and becomes stranded in the empty pool with a crocodile and his injured girlfriend, Kay (Grace Ratnomnot Ratchiratham).

I really wanted to love this movie, I really did. It just was executed so poorly that it made it an exhausting watch. This movie is when every bad thing that you could ever think of comes perfectly together to target one singular person. And for a creature feature, that would normally work. The problem lies in that the film takes itself too seriously and tries too hard to be a solid thriller and wanting the audience to not think about how absurd everything that is going on is that it completely misses the mark. It wanted to capitalize on the realness of the event that the absurdity of this perfect storm was completely unrealistic. All that being said, I did like how the crocodile was portrayed. The goal of the movie was to ultimately focus on the pool being the big bad, and not the creature. It takes a while for you to realize that, and it is a good twist that the movie did well working that element well. The crocodile was as just a victim as Day and Kay were, and thus the actions of the crocodile were much less over the top and real.

Spoiler:

Another major misstep in the movie was the death of his dog. It was unnecessarily gruesome and placed at the end solely for a reaction to an audience. At this point it does fit with every absurd thing that could go wrong did, but it was an obvious ploy for reaction that was not warranted and did absolutely nothing for the plot, nor help with the horror. It was a ridiculous writing decision.

The Pool is streaming on Shudder and AsianCrush.

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