Swimfan (2002)

Some films seem to improve the second time around and others warrant multiple viewings with something satisfyingly new registering each time. This film does not fit into either category and its second view was even less appealing than its first, since any novelty value it may have had once is now gone, gone, gone. You may well ask, why bother to watch it again, but that is another story.



It plays like a junior league version of "Fatal Attraction" with a very definitely B-list (or worse) teenaged cast. Jesse Bradford is a previously-troubled high school senior who has served time in juvie, but who has found redemption through his star status on the swim team and with his loving girlfriend Shiri Appleby. Enter would-be siren and full-time psycho Erika Christensen (Michael Douglas' daughter in "Traffic" and a little homely to my eye) who sets out to seduce him (in the swimming pool of course) and manages to do so without too much resistance on his part. The trouble is that he can't get rid of her as she bombards him with e-mails with tasteful nude photos of herself, gets him fired from his hospital job by switching his patients' meds, loses him his position on the team and his chances for a college scholarship by slipping him anabolic steroids, kills his team-mate and plants incrimating evidence, tries to kill his girlfriend, yada yada yada. It all goes to prove that in movies teenage immorality can only end in disaster! By the movie's end his once starry future seems more than a little uncertain -- but that will learn him say the moralists.



In the film's favour, it was only a scant eighty minutes!