Producers: Andrew Pagana, Michael Chuney, Christos Kalabogias and Ryan David Jahn    Director: Geo Santini   Screenplay: Ryan David Jahn   Cast: Christos Kalabogias, Scotty Tovar, Geo Santini, Justin Taite, Brett Zimmerman, Douglas Smith, Annie Gonzalez, Andrew Pagana, Courtney Turk and Golan Edik   Distributor: Saban Films

Grade: D-

Geo Santini’s threadbare excuse for a thriller is based a premise that’s served reliably since times immemorial—the one about thieves who fall out over their loot.  Sometimes the result is a masterpiece, like “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”  “The Bad Shepherd” falls at the other end of the cinematic spectrum; it’s the polar opposite of a masterpiece.

It begins with a young woman (Courtney Turk) abandoning her stalled car on an unpaved road through the forest, extracting a gun and duffel bag from it, and beginning to walk.  Soon a pickup truck comes barreling along and hits her; she’s dead.  The truck disgorges four scruffy guys, headed for a remote cabin to do some hunting.  Paul (Christos Kalabogias) wants to call the police, but is opposed by John (Scotty Tovar), who inspects the bag and finds it full of cash.  Travis (Brett Zimmerman), the driver, has two DUIs already and would prefer not involving the police, and Leonard (Justin Taite) goes along with him and John, who proposes burying the corpse and divvying up the loot.  When a scruffy cop (Douglas Smith) interrupts them, he winds up dead too, so they arrange the scene to make it appear she killed him and disappeared with the bag. 

So the four men drive to their cabin with a body to bury and money in hand.  All seems okay until another man arrives, an oily guy named Sidney (Santini) in turtle neck sweater and sports coat, who insists they give him the money.  He soon reveals that he knows all about each of them, even their innermost secrets, and says they would do well to do as he asks. They debate what to do while holding him prisoner and fall into argument.

Who is Sidney?  Well, if you think in Biblical terms the title indicates that, as does his unaccountable knowledge, his references to hunting, and his apparent invulnerability.  The four men are apparently his quarry.  As they debate things, they kill another man—identified as Outback (Andrew Pagana), a nervous fellow who wanders toward the cabin, claiming to be living nearby in the woods with his family (and proving it, supposedly, by sporting an old-fashioned Davy Crockett Coonskin cap); John forces Leonard to shoot the poor sap.  It also comes out that Travis has been involved with Paul’s wife Megan (Annie Gonzalez), which of course drives a rift between them.  Meanwhile John is unmasked as the killer of a call girl (Golan Edik) who had tried to rob him after a night’s work years back.

Sidney eggs on their hostility toward one another until they’re at each other’s throats, and the outcome is not happy.

The movie is technically a subfusc affair, filmed drearily by Hugo Bordes (although there are some nice overhead tracking shots, perhaps the work of Kevin Perry, who’s credited with heading the “California Unit,” and made sinister by Ryan Gordon’s gloomy score).  It’s all lazily edited by none other than director Santini, who, had he much self-awareness, would have whittled down his own scenes as Sidney.  His performance is showy in the worst way; it seems that he’s trying to emulate the silken malevolence Alan Arkin brought to “Wait Until Dark” and failing miserably. Of course, it doesn’t help that the lines provided him by Ryan David Jahn are hilariously portentous, at least as he delivers them.  The other actors are amateurish but at least tolerable, though both Smith and Pagana—the latter of whom is also a producer—don’t meet even that low bar.  

A note to filmmakers: it’s not a good idea to put the word “bad” in your title when it’s so perfectly descriptive of your movie.  One always likes to call a debut feature promising, but in this case, that word only means the people involved should promise not to do it again. 

Producers: James Wan and Jason Blum   Director: Bryce McGuire   Screenplay: Bryce McGuire   Cast: Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amelie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren, Jodi Long, Nancy Lenehan, Eddie Martinez, Ayazhan Dalabayeva, Elijah Roberts, Rahnuma Panthaky and Ben Sinclair   Distributor: Universal     

Grade: D-

Like quite a few horror movies of recent years, “Night Swim” originated as a short film, barely three minutes long (you can catch it on YouTube), that Bryce McGuire wrote and co-directed with Rod Blackhurst.  Ten years later Blackhurst has moved on to other projects, but McGuire has expanded his original idea and directed the resultant feature on his own. 

As usual in such cases, the expansion proves a ham-handed affair, the rare horror flick that, despite lots of jump shots and attempts at general eeriness, manages to produce virtually no scares.  It’s just painfully dull.

The movie begins with a scene reminiscent of the short film, a vignette in which a woman, swimming in a pool one night, thinks she hears a noise and sees a frightening figure; the lights go out, and when they come bank on, she’s disappeared.  Here, in a flashback set in 1992, young Rebecca (Ayazhan Dalabayeva) peers out her bedroom window and sees a toy boat, presumably her ill brother’s, in the backyard swimming pool.  She goes out to retrieve it and, leaning over the side, is sucked into the water.

Cut to the present day, where Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell), his wife Eve (Kerry Condon) and their children, teen Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and younger brother Elliot (Gavin Warren) are touring empty houses with a jovial realtor (Nancy Lenehan).  Ray’s a major league baseball player whose career has been cut short by the onset of multiple sclerosis.  They’re drawn to the one we recognize as Rebecca’s, mainly by the presence of the pool: Ray thinks that swimming could be therapeutic.  So they close the deal, and before long he is feeling much better; his doctor (Rahnuma Panthaky) is amazed by his improvement.  Could it be because the water—as a garrulous pool tech (Ben Sinclair, in an amusing cameo) has explained—comes not from the city supply but from an underground stream?  As they say in Minnesota, where the story is set, you betcha.

But, as we’re repeatedly reminded as the plot lumbers on, love requires sacrifice, and Ray’s physical improvement comes at a cost.  As will eventually be revealed to an increasingly concerned Eve by Rebecca’s mother (Jodi Long), the waters can restore health, but in return demand the life of others, as they turn out to have done repeatedly in the past.  First the family cat disappears, and then Izzy is threatened by strange figures (looking, in Ian S. Takahashi’s underwater photography, like grinning Michael Myers masks) while frolicking in the pool one night with handsome classmate—and swimming team star—Ronin (Elijah Roberts).

But it’s Elliot, an introspective kid with none of his dad’s athletic prowess, who becomes the target as the increasingly strong Ray is possessed by some evil force, represented by black ooze that comes out of the pool’s drainage system to take him over.  He causes a panic at a pool party where, under the pool’s spell, he endangers the son of Elliot’s school baseball coach (Eddie Martinez), and is AWOL when Elliot is nearly killed when the tarp system they’ve installed to cover the pool malfunctions and traps him.  (The scene is obviously inspired by the better executed one in Rachel Talalay’s little-remembered 1993 thriller “Ghost in the Machine.”)  But Eve intervenes to save the boy and, after her weird conversation with Rebecca’s mother, most of the family.  The movie ends with the pool being covered over with dirt, which should perhaps be the fate of the picture as well. 

The central problem with “Night Swim” isn’t that it’s fright-free (McGuire’s staging of the pool party sequence, which should have been a high point, is extraordinarily inept), but that it never satisfactorily explains what’s going on.  We get references to Faustian bargains that people make with the waters to secure their health-giving power, but aren’t shown how those bargains are made (one can imagine a “Wicker Man”-like scenario that could have been employed to provide backstory); indeed, it seems that Ray is possessed involuntarily.  And what exactly are those critters lurking beneath the waters?  Are they creatures transplanted from the black lagoon to the suburbs?  One would think that since McGuire had nearly a decade to work out the scenario, he could have done better than this.

Still, to give credit where it’s due, the cast is game.  Condon tries to infuse Eve with genuine emotion—this is no tongue-in-cheek turn—and both Hoeferle and Warren are committed kids, but they’re defeated by the weak material.  Russell proves incredibly bland as the Jack Torrance stand-in, though he does try to inject some humor into his mad moments late in the story.  Unhappily, most of the supporting cast—Lenehan, Sinclair, and especially Long—are encouraged to go over the top; it’s here that mention of tongue-in-cheek is appropriate.  The picture looks decent—Hillary Gurtler’s production design is fine, as is Charlie Sarroff’s (above water) cinematography, but given McGuire’s weak script and direction, editor Jeff McEvoy can’t do much to generate tension, and Mark Korven’s generic score doesn’t either.                       

It’s only the beginning of January, but this waterlogged attempt to establish a genre franchise (since it’s set in Minnesota, how about a sequel called “Night Hockey,” in which the pool has frozen over?) could wind up being one of the worst films of the year.  On the other hand, if you take it as a parody of bad horror movies, it might become a camp classic.