Day (Theeradej Wongpuapan) awakes to find himself trapped in a titanic empty pool with a gator nibbling on his leg.
How did he end up in this nightmare scenario. well it tangentially involves a woman in clown makeup sitting on a fancy-ass couch underwater… as these things so often do.
Long story short, Day (and his puppy) just completed work on a film set at the luxurious, but abandoned, pool mentioned above… and hangs around for a private swim the next day… a swim that finds him goofing off a bit too much, so that when the water drains a bit he is unable to exit the pool.
This is bad news on a number of levels, as Day is unable to reach the insulin he needs to live, and when his cellphone falls in the water, he is unable to call for help. To make matters even worse, his girlfriend Koi (Ratnamon Ratchiratham) arrives, and gets seriously injured before winding up in the same dreaded predicament. And then that gator makes the scene…
The Pool is, if you hadn’t guessed, a nail-biting thriller (in one well done gross out scene literally), but writer/director Ping Lumpraploeng isn’t afraid to revel in the kind of glorious nonsense we all love ’round these putrid parts!
While our beleaguered heroes are put through hell (all made believable through the solid performances of leads Wongpuapan and Ratchiratham), the way they get there is superfluous, and the addition of the gator a bit of over-the-top overkill that worked for your’s cruelly while being gloriously ridiculous.
Speaking of that beastly baddie, he is mostly a CG affair, and to be honest he isn’t badly done especially considering the fine folks that created it probably had low dough to make movie miracles happen.
As is my way, I have to tell you cats n’ creeps that there is some rather intense (though simulated) animal violence on display here, so if you are sensitive to such things, this may not be the fright flick for you.
All in all, The Pool is a wicked winner, full of man against nature thrills n’ chills that never fail to generate tons of that sinister suspense horror hounds lap up with wild abandon!
The Pool is available to view now on Shudder!
