Pool Boy Nightmare (The Asylum, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I had high hopes for the next movie on LIfetime’s schedule last night, Pool Boy Nightmare (incidentally the title is spelled as two words on imdb.com but three words on the actual credits), mainly because the words “pool boy” in the title promised us a nice, hunky piece of man-meat as the titular pool boy, and I was not disappointed in that department. Though I would have liked more body hair and a more butch face instead of a baby one, Tanner Zagarino was all I could have hoped for: tall, well muscled and with a quite promising basket writer-director Rolfe Kanefsky lets us see a lot of in mid-shots of him wearing beach shorts and nothing else. Like Sinfidelity, Pool Boy Nightmare opens with a prologue establishing at the start that Adam Lance (Tanner Zagarino) is a murderer: he corners the woman who owns the house whose pool he’s supposedly cleaning, drowns her in the pool (after a bizarre and quite imaginative scene in which he literally “nets” her with his pool sweeper) but then puts her in the bathtub and fakes the scene to look like an accident.

Then the main action begins: Gale Foley (Jessica Morris, top-billed), a high-powered accountant who’s been raising her 18-year-old daughter Becca (Ellie Darcey-Alden) as a single parent since her husband Tony (Clark Moore, whom I found almost as sexy as Tanner Zagarino, albeit in a more mature and more butch way) left her to have a flaming mid-life crisis, buy a sports-model BMW and disport with a series of bimbos little older than Becca. Gale has bought the house where the previous owner died and has inherited the pool boy (“pool man,” he insists, since he’s 25), obviously worried far less than she should be about the jinx one might expect from the mysterious death that occurred there. Gale, who if anything has a sexier figure than her daughter, attracts the attentions of the amorous pool boy -- though, like Angela in Sinfidelity, she only has sex with him once and regards it as a big mistake. To get back at Gale for dumping him so peremptorily, Adam decides to get his revenge by dating Becca -- who’s attracted to the idea of sex with an older man. Mom goes into full overprotective mode, grounding Becca and trying to throw as many roadblocks in the way as possible.

Unknowingly, she’s got an ally in Becca’s best friend Jackie (Cynthia Aileen Strahan), who works at “Creamology,” the local ice cream parlor, where both Foley women are such regular customers one wonders how they maintain their girlish figures. Jackie is first happy for her friend that she’s got such a hunk in her life, but when she searches “Adam Lance” on her computer she finds that he has no presence on social media at all. That’s enough to make her suspicious of him -- after all, even if he didn’t want to do the Facebook or Twitter thing one would presume he’d at least want an on-line presence to attract more customers for his pool-cleaning services -- and as for Gale, she’s so upset that Becca is dating her sloppy seconds she ramps up her overprotectiveness. As for Adam, his obsession goes into typical Lifetime-movie overdrive, especially when he orders so many flowers and gifts sent to Gale’s workplace (how did he know where that was?) that Gale’s boss Victoria (Angela Nicholas), who seems not to want her employees to have any private lives at all, threatens to fire her. Gale tries to enlist her husband Tony to intimidate Adam into leaving her family alone, and Tony duly shows up at Adam’s place (surprisingly fancy for a 25-year-old who makes a living as a pool cleaner), gives him a good hard punch in the stomach and warns that there’s more to come. Then we hear sounds of crashing as Adam goes back inside and closes the door behind him, and it turns out that Adam has beaten himself up to make it look like Tony worked him over big-time. What’s more, he’s sent the photos of himself in this condition to all three Foleys and to the police.

Fortunately Adam’s antics have attracted the attention of a relative rarity in Lifetime movies -- an intelligent cop, a woman named Detective Davidson (Gina Hiraizumi) who manages to get Adam’s juvenile criminal record unsealed and figures out What Makes Adam Run. Though writer-director Kanefsky had to pull some punches to appease the TV ratings board, it seems that when he was 14 years old Adam was sexually seduced by his mother Rhonda (seen in a flashback and played by Sarah French) and enlisted Adam’s aid in killing his dad -- sort of Oedipus Rex meets Psycho. It’s not clear what happened to Rhonda (presumably she went to prison and later died) but Adam was tried as a juvenile and then let go. But this made it impossible for him to perform sexually with women his own age and led him to search out older women with pools he could clean, seduce them and form the typical romantic obsessions of a Lifetime villain on them until they definitively rejected him, whereupon he killed them.

Adam also attempts to kill Gale’s ex Tony by spiking the water of his Jacuzzi with a toxic chemical, and he tries to kill Becca’s friend Jackie by pushing her off the ledge of Gale’s pool, which has since been drained by the nerdier and heavily accented pool person Gale’s hired to replace Adam. Both of them fortunately end up hospitalized but still alive -- and I give Kanefsky credit for having all the murders in this film, completed or attempted, involve water or pools -- and in the end there’s the typical final confrontation in which Gale corners Adam while he’s in the bathtub of her house and dangles a plugged-in hair dryer over him, threatening to drop it in and electrocute him, though in the end Detective Davidson comes in as a deus ex machina and arrests Adam for the murder of the house’s previous owner, saying ominously, “You won’t get off so easily this time.” (Actually Adam doesn’t seem to have had any problem getting off!)

Though beset by bizarre continuity issues my husband Charles had fun pointing out -- in the scene in which Adam makes love to Gale he has a two-day growth of beard when he approaches her outside on the pool patio, is clean-shaven when they’re in bed together and has the beard again outside after they finish; and after Adam supposedly bruises himself to frame Tony for assault, the next scenes showing him stripped down for action (aquatic, sexual or whatever) show no trace of the bruises -- Pool Boy Nightmare was mostly the sort of good clean dirty Lifetime fun I was expecting from the title, and the acting and casting were quite a bit more impressive than those in Sinfidelity: Jessica Morris has a great figure and one wonders why her husband jilted her for bimbo Cindi Sullivan (Valeria Gomez) except that Cindi has much bigger tits. Morris and Ellie Darcey-Alden powerfully present the clash between the protective mother and the daughter who’s ready to leave the nest (it’s established that Becca is 18 and about to graduate from high school and go off to college in the fall), complicated by her own guilt feelings over having had sex with the man she’s trying to warn her daughter away from. And aside from being drop-dead gorgeous, Tanner Zagarino does the character’s superficial charm so well I’m not sure Pool Boy Nightmare wouldn’t have worked better if Kanefsky had omitted the prologue and allowed Zagarino to play the character as a bit oafish and immature but outwardly sympathetic until the characters started noticing things a little “off” about him and ultimately realized how crazy and dangerous he really was.