The Drownsman

Director - Chad Archibald (Bite, Creepy Canada)
Starring - Michelle Mylett (Antisocial), Caroline Palmer (Lovebites), and Ry Barrett (Zombieworld)
Release Date - 2014
Genre - Horror
Tagline - "How long can you hold your breath?"
Format - BluRay (Personal Collection) (Screener)

Rating (out of 5):

     Slashers are known to follow the same formula and rarely step outside of their comfort zone.  The story has been told thousands of times spanning over 40 years and yet we still get new slashers popping up almost daily still using this tired and true story.  That story most of the time involved a masked killer hunting down teenagers and murdering them with sharp objects.  This story has mixed it up over the years and very few films get away from this too far.  A few weeks ago I saw the movie The Drownsman at Wal-Mart and it looked like a decent Wal-Mart horror flick.  I saw that the film was released by Anchor Bay so I reached out to them for a review copy of this unusual slasher and they were kind enough to send me one.  Thanks guys!

     The film follows a beautiful young girl that accidentally falls in a lake and almost drowns.  While she is in the water she has visions of a long haired man that is trying to hold her under the water.  This becomes a crippling experience for the young lady and she develops a fear of standing water whether it be a lake or a simple bathtub filled with water.  Her friends call in someone to hold a seance to help ease her friend out of this but something goes wrong and the Drownsman shows himself to her again and this time he starts clinging to reality.  Her friends refuse to believe her and think she is losing her mind but they start dying one by one at the hands of the drownsman whenever they come in contact with water.  Once one of her friends has a close encounter with the drownsman she starts to believe her and sets out to discover who he is and why he is doing this.  They find a man online that lost his daughter to her and they meet with him where they learn that he was a man that stayed in his mother's womb too long.  As he matured he started drowning women until he meet the wrong one. She fooled him and was able to drown him but not after he spilled his seed in her.  That seed is now the young woman that is being haunted by him.  She must now fight to stop her father from killing her or suffer a horrible death at the hands of the father she never knew.

     The Drownsman looked interesting for several reasons.  One, it was a slasher released from Anchor Bay that was sitting on the shelves of Wal-Mart.  When I was in high school I started collecting DVDs and my favorite to buy were Anchor Bay released horror flicks.  Sure, their quality of horror flicks has slipped in recent years but they still pump out a few decent releases here and there.  The second, and most important reason, was that it was a slasher in which the killer killed by water.  How fucking different is that?  However, no matter how much originality this film had to offer it could not save it from becoming a forgettable flick.  The acting in this one is decent and something we come to expect from a horror flick with a budget this size.  The characters are all flat as a cardboard cutout but this is not the cast's fault.  This stems from poor story.  The story for this one is original as hell but is poorly developed and executed but does feel like something we have seen before.  The story featuring a slasher that pulls people into his water drenched torture lab from merely having them touch water was fucking fantastic and gives the slasher sub-genre a somewhat revitalizing new story.  With that being said, the film does feel like another A Nightmare on Elm St flick where the dreams are replaced by water. The story featuring the father trying to capture/kill his daughter is something fans may recall in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare where the film's main character thinks Freddy is her father and he is killing to get to her.  Horror fans can look past this if the film is able to pull off the characters and give them someone to back but the film cant.  The characters are boring and you actually want them all to die.  Finally, the film has several kills scenes but they fail to capture the viewer's attention and provide entertainment.  The film sets out to give the viewer these various traps in which they can drown people, think Saw meets Jaws, but it results in the viewer watching women kick around in water for several minutes without any real entertainment value.  The film does have some decent practical effects and the killer's make up is fucking fantastic.  Overall, The Drownsman is a film I had high expectations for but the film failed to capture the entertainment.  This is a killer I could really get behind but the film fails to follow through with the story that it had and falls somewhere into mediocrity.  I say check it out once but it has no replay value and will leave you feeling disappointed.