Boy Meets Girl; Girl Becomes Glenn Close

Ripped from the pages of the “See Dick Run, See Jane Stalk Him” handbook, the thrill-less thriller “Swimfan” is as dumb as it gets. Teenage boy with teenage girlfriend beds teenage girl who isn’t his girlfriend. The latter turns out to be psycho. (She has a fatal attraction.) Add pet bunny.

Stir.

When Adrian Lyne’s “Fatal Attraction” was released in 1987, the nastily enjoyable cautionary tale caused a minor scandal because it looked as fresh as the post-feminist moment. Its shocks and ham-fisted morality had been lifted from scads of earlier films, but no matter; audiences everywhere pointed thumbs down at the blond who would be Michael Douglas’ queen.

If the psycho-stalker story looks less fresh now, it’s in part because real life has a way of making cheap stories look cheaper: There are simply too many sad newspaper stories out in the world to make a stalker thriller the first choice in evening entertainment. Then there’s the fact that after all this time it may be OK to admit that Glenn Close’s character--the wild woman who crawled into the married man’s bed only to end up dead in his bathtub--was really the film’s tragic heroine. Surely I’m not the only one who was sorry to see this tough broad die, especially on account of such a pusillanimous louse.

Louse sums up the guy in “Swimfan,” as well, and pretty much everyone else connected with this moldering hash. Varsity high school swimmer Ben Cronin (Jesse Bradford) meets and intimately greets the new girl at school, Madison Bell (Erika Christensen), whose Anna Magnani street-mama wardrobe of cigarette skirts and perilous heels are instant signals that she and the filmmakers are up to no good. Faced with such sartorial distractions, and a nearly naked girl grinding her body into his, Ben has no choice but to make the wrong choice. One evening, trapped in the deep end of the pool, he pledges loyalty to his girlfriend, Amy (Shiri Appleby), even as he takes the (apparently unprotected) plunge with Madison.

Before you know it--and you know this plot kink and every other development long before they happen--Madison is hunting Ben down, accompanied by her very own psycho-chick refrain, though here the shrieking notes sound lifted from an old Carol Burnett sketch instead of the Bernard Herrmann catalog.

Given the lapses in continuity (entire scenes seem to be missing) and especially Madison’s eye-popping meltdown (which itself summons up warm memories of classic Burnett), it’s too bad that director John Polson didn’t have either the will or the foresight to push the film to full-blown camp.

The problem is that it’s hard to camp up a movie already so deeply in touch with its exploitative roots: Madison isn’t just an average psycho-stalker, she’s one of those vixen’s whose decolletage is a barometer of her mental health, which means the nastier she grows, the more she shows.

The actors never have a chance. Bradford, an appealing former child actor who’s done fine work in films such as “King of the Hill” and “Far From Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog,” spends most of the movie with his mouth hanging open, which is never a wise strategy for a performer making the transition to older roles. On the other hand, it’s hard to know what to say about Christensen, who spent most of “Traffic” playing a zonked-out drug addict and here seems to be auditioning for the Bette Davis role in the prequel to “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” Special mention, however, does go to the invaluable character actor Dan Hedaya, for playing his role (as Ben’s coach) with the same gravitas he brings to all his performances, and to a young actor named James Debello, who as Madison’s cousin seems to be the only one here who’s in on the joke.

Overly long at even 84 minutes, “Swimfan” sputters to its inevitable conclusion, preordained by a welter of genre precursors and an antediluvian attitude to teenage sexuality.

However fundamentally punitive its moralism, “Fatal Attraction” was at its core riddled with contradictions about men, women and sex; “Swimfan,” on the other hand, isn’t any different from those slasher films that undress girls and boys to get a bead on their vulnerable flesh--except that it’s sometimes pretty funny. Although its disjointed quality makes it hard to know if the film went wrong before, during or after production, there’s one thing about “Swimfan” that’s crystal clear: Neither Polson nor screenwriters Charles Bohl and Phillip Schneider, or anyone else connected with the movie, seems to really like kids. Here’s hoping the kids feel the same.

MPAA rating: PG-13, for mature thematic elements, sexual content, disturbing images and language. Times guidelines: No nudity but some suggestive sex scenes.

‘Swimfan’

Jesse Bradford...Ben

Erika Christensen...Madison

Shiri Appleby...Amy

Kate Burton...Carla

Clayne Crawford...Josh

A Greenstreet Films/Cobalt Media Group/Further Films production, released by Twentieth Century Fox. Director John Polson. Writers Charles Bohl and Phillip Schneider. Producers John Penotti, Allison Lyon Segan and Joe Caracciolo Jr. Director of photography Giles Nuttgens. Production Designer Kalina Ivanov. Editor Sarah Flack. Costume designer Arjun Bhasin. Running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes.

In general release.