Swim Instructor Nightmare, a.k.a. Psycho Swim Instructor (Johnson Production Group, Shadowboxer Films, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Since the Winter Olympics closing ceremonies ended well before I’d expected them to, I was able to watch a Lifetime movie and a PBS concert special rerun as well. The Lifetime movie was called Swim Instructor Nightmare – though imdb.com lists it under what they said was a later title. Psycho Swim Instructor – and it opens with a women swimmer named Sabrina Jameson (Sydney Hamm) having an argument with her coach, Sharky Wallace (Elijah Mahar). He tells her that he’s cutting her from the squad he’s training for the “Summer Games” (apparently the writer, David Chester, was so afraid of the power and ferocious protectiveness of the International Olympic Committee towards their intellectual property that he didn’t dare use the “O”-word) because her lap times in the training pool are actually slowing down. She then reaches for his crotch, apparently thinking that he’ll let her stay on the team if she gives him a blow job (or more), but he points out he’s married and isn’t interested in her sexually. Tnen Sabrina has a hissy-fit of jealous rage and the two struggle in the pool, seemingly to death, and it’s touch and go whether either or both will survive.

The next scene takes place one year later, and Sabrina is complaining to her mother Violet (Janis Carter) that she’s been reduced to “teaching other people’s brats to swim.” But she’s also fallen in obsessive love with the father of ner newest charge: Parker Scott (an absolutely gorgeous and delectable piece of man-meat named CJ Hammond – that’s how he’s billed), whose wife Ellen (Shellie Sterling) is in rehab for having drunk herself out of a career as a divorce attorney. Besides being drop-dead gorgeous Parker is also well-to-do, making his living as an investment consultant (I don’t know that many Black investment consultants, but I don’t know that many white ones, either), and Sabrina immediately sets her cap for him because (though we’re not told this until later) her dad left her mom when Sabrina was just five and ever since then she’s had a “thing” for older men. She tells her mom she’s just met “the one,” and mom, having lived through this scenario with her daughter before, understands what’s going on and turns her back on Sabrina to call the poor pigeon and warn him.

Big mistake: Sabrina grabs a frying pan off the stove and clongs her mom with it, though she later seems surprised that the blow has actually killed her. Nonetheless, she’s resourceful: she drags her mother’s dead body into the tub and later gets a large can of sulfuric acid and uses it to dissolve her mom’s remains completely. (According to an article on the Web site of Discover magazine, https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-mafia-was-wrong-you-cant-quickly-dissolve-a-body-in-acid, pure sulfuric acid can’t dissolve a body, but if you add water to it, it can in 12 hours, which is the obvious significance of Sabrina putting her mom’s corpse in a bathtub.)

Then Sabrina shows up for work and finds out Parker’s 10-year-old daughter Ashley (Kiarra Beasley), the girl Sabrina is supposed to teach to swim, had a phobia against going in the water because the day Ashley’s mom Ellen was supposed to give her her first swimming lesson, she fell into a drunken stupor and never showed up at the pool. Sabrina manages to get Ashley into the pool and starts teaching her to swim, but at the same time her lustful interest in Parker is all too obvious, and when Ellen returns from rehab she, as a former divorce lawyer, immediately spots the way Sabrina is looking at her husband and demands that he fire her. The replacement is Donna Dean (Mackenzie Possage), who actually made it to the Oly- – oops, I mean the “Games” – and won a bronze medal. Donna is training for another “Games” shot and was hoping to win gold this time, but Sabrina takes care of that: once again, Donna makes the same mistake Sabrina’s mom did – she turns her back and threatens to call the police while Sabrina goes into a murderous rage – and eventually Sabrina knocks Donna into the pool and drowns her, saying as she dies, “You’re never going to win that gold medal now.”

Sabrina also plots to get Ellen back into rehab by feeding her a cookie spiked with Rohypnol and hiding a bottle of Scotch under the couch, and naturally when Parker returns home and sees the worst, Ellen passed out in bed and Ashley in the pool alone, he assumes the worst and orders her back. But this turns out to be a lucky break because Ellen remembers during another group-therapy session in which, after she hears another patient mentions the movie Jaws and says it’s about a shark attack, recalls that she was told Sabrina trained under a coach named Sharky. She talks a nice but rather dim aide into giving her back her cell phone, though with him watching her she knows she can only text, not call, her husband – who in the meantime has actually been seduced by Sabrina (there are a couple of lubricious soft-core porn scenes between them in which I got some nice glimpses of CJ Hammond’s glorious body – yum!) and has invited her to his home to look after Ashley for the two weeks he’s going to be in New York on business. Only Ellen has fled the rehab center and found her car in the parking lot the very next day, and she arrives home in time to rescue her husband from the clutches of the psycho swim instructor, and she knocks out Sabrina by swinging a convenient golf club in her direction.

The final shot is of Sabrina being arrested – writer David Chester wisely avoided one of the open-ended finishes we’ve sounded lately. There is no scene of Sabrina getting away and turning up at the home of some other older man who has a failing marriage and a child whom he wants to teach to swim. There is also no scene of Sabrina rubbing her belly while she’s in prison,obviously plotting a way to get back into the life of the man who’s fathered her child-to-be. And there’s no reaction shot of Ashley, who quite likely would be devastated by seeing Sabrina, whom she still loves and trusts, being led away in handcuffs by the cops. With all that – and the decision to make the three central characters Black (as if Lifetime is celebrating Black History Month by putting Black actors through the usual paces of their formulae they previously reserved for white ones), though they are all what once called “high yellows,” and in a weird sort of internal racism within the African-American community they were widely respected and got the leads in “race movies” while darker-skinned Blacks were relegated to villains or comic-relief roles – Swim Instructor Nightmare is actually a nicely done movie. The director, Doug Campbell, has doing those sorts of things so long and yet there are some quite creative shots in there, as if his long-standing experience hasn’t jaded him. And the acting is generally good, even though I was too busy drooling over CJ Hammond to care whether he could act or not and I liked the fact that as the thankless part of the wife, Shellie Sterling got to be at least as sexy as Sydney Hamm and got a lot of skin-tight jeans to show it off. One roots for Ellen to get over her problem and she and Parker to stay together!