Pool Party Massacre

Dir: Drew Marvick

2017

*

I feel stupid for watching this utter rubbish. I know not to get mixed up with online hype but for some reason Pool Party Massacre reeled me. The title is great and the movie’s poster is one of my favourite horror posters in many years – these two point should have been a big clue that the film was always going to be a let down. It is supposed to be a throwback to the 80's slasher film but it really isn’t, it just has a cool 80s poster and that is it. If it was a fun fan film made by friends for their own personal enjoyment then great, well done to them, but as a commercial venture I just can’t get behind it. In eating terms it is like chewing barbed wire. There is a pool and there is a massacre, albeit a tiny one, but there is no party here. I have major grievances with it as a horror film and as a film in general. Firstly, as a horror film it fails to deliver some basic elements that all horror fans want. There is no suspense – we know who is going to die, in which order and by which method. Our villain is not in the least bit scary. I believe our killer is supposed to be a mix of Jason Vorhees and Micheal Myers but without the mask. We don’t actually see the killers head until the very end where it is revealed to be none other than the film’s director Drew Marvick, which impresses no one, other than Marvick’s mum and probably Marvick himself. I understand that film makers on a low budget need to often cast themselves in roles due to money restrictions but Pool Party Massacre seems to feature Marvick and his friends because of ego. I find it so stupid that none of them ever try to disguise themselves, they are all heavy metal dudes and the film ends up feeling like they’re own personal film for personal viewing, rather than for a general public. This makes the film feel cliquie, which really doesn’t let the audience feel part of the film. The characters and story are badly written, I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece but there is absolutely zero development in any aspect of the story. Fine, if the film makers clearly just concentrated on the horror element but they don’t. The killings are dull. We see the killer chose tools from the house’s tool shed so we know what is coming but generally the victims either get a knife, axe or blunt instrument shoved in their head. The one interesting killing was death by grass trimmer – not that I believe one can be killed by one – which was hidden behind a shower curtain. The blood splashes seemed to be created by having the crew member with the weakest grip squirt tomato sauce out of a squeezy bottle. The horror element looks amateur – which it is – but I have seen kids do better with no money and no experience, the film makers have zero creativity, to the point that you wonder how comprehensive their horror film knowledge really is. The general film making element of the movie is excruciatingly bad, even for amateurs, but it is clear they’ve had some training. I wasn’t expecting award-winning performances, especially as most of the cast are porn stars, but the dialogue featured in this film is some of the worst I’ve ever seen. I don’t think there is an excuse for this. Because the actors (ha) are all shot individually, the conversations are stifled, to the point where they don’t even feel like conversations at all, just people reading out lines, many seconds apart. This an editing issue as well as a cinematography issue, both the responsibility of Brian Mills, who is also a producer. A Jack of all trades but a master of none. The characters are pretty much all the same, a group of bikini-wearing airheads who are supposedly friends (even though none of them look as if they know each other) who spend the whole film bitching to one another. It is difficult to listen to, indeed, this is the only time I would recommend people to fast-forward to the kill scenes – not that I would recommend watching at all though. The only one piece of dialogue that almost had me interested was a character theorising about the idea that Ferris Bueller was actually Cameron’s imagination in the famous 1987 John Hughes film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, comparing it to the plot twist from Fight Club. The idea however didn’t add up, making it a complete waste of time. The idea is a actually rife on the internet, from the same areas of the web that think this film is half-decent. The killings are few and far between so most of the film is filler. This filler consists of awful dialogue and nothing else. I’m surprised that they didn’t just feature more nudity, as most of the girls were porn stars. I’m glad they didn’t, but why hire them in the first place? I understand the mentality of the sort of people who like this sort of thing and you’d think: nudity, followed by killing, followed by nudity and repeat would have been the way forward but no, they added the thing that absolutely no horror fan wants: mindless chat. Pool Party Massacre is a cheap and pointless horror tribute that fails at everything it sets out to achieve. I would hazard a guess that the film isn’t even the film that the film makers hoped for either – which is amazing, as this should have been the easiest film to make with the smallest of budgets. Don’t waste your time, even if you are a connoisseur of crap horror.