Wet Hot American: Swimfan (John Polson, 2002)

When last we left our hero: Everything was terrible, so I decided to watch a bunch of bad movies from the 2000s.

Here’s the thing I need you to understand: From approximately 1996 to 2004, everyone in America thought it would be a great idea to have sex in a pool. 

It is not great to have sex in a pool. You know this. I know this. It’s too cold, even when it’s warm, and the water provides the wrong kind of lubrication, so there’s weird friction. Chlorine gets in your eyes — and ears, and nose. I won’t tell you where else it’s going. You can figure it out. 

Nevertheless, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, pool sex was the forbidden erotic pleasure on everybody’s mind. Showgirls had sex in a pool. Wild Things had sex in a pool. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer had Jack Black, doing an uncomfortably minstrel-y take on a Jamaican accent, and it also had a bunch of teenagers trying and failing to have sex in a pool. 

At some point, Hollywood executives, realizing they had stumbled onto a goldmine with this “pool sex” concept, asked themselves: What if there were a movie entirely centered on people having sex in a pool? This is how we got 2002’s Erika Christensen breakout vehicle, Swimfan. 

Now: I’m not sure at what point in the process it was decided that the pool sex movie had to be for teenagers, or when they decided it had to be Fatal Attraction, but transposed to high school, so it made even less sense. But all of these decisions were, in fact, made, and endorsed by Erika Christensen, so let’s gin up the old spreadsheet: 

As you can see, we’re witnessing the last gasp of the erotic thriller — the final hour of the once-great genre, which had become (bewilderingly) almost entirely teen-focused by 1998. There might be one or two more movies worth watching. (By my count, those movies are Cruel Intentions — once again, a testament to the triumph of the ‘90s Teens — and Unfaithful, the last big hit by Adrian Lyne, which was bafflingly nominated for several awards, including one Oscar.) For the most part, though, we’re at the sad, end-of-the-road, lost-glory phase of Erotic Thrills. If this is VH1: Behind the Music, half the original band has overdosed and the rest are playing county fairs. If this is Sunset Boulevard, the Erotic Thriller has been shot in the back and its corpse is floating face-down in a pool. 

Not coincidentally, corpses actually end up floating in pools here, because this is Swimfan, a movie where Eros and Thanatos alike are ineluctably drawn to that hotbed of sensuality, your local high school’s moderately-sized indoor lap pool.