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"I don't know how else to say this! I'm trying to drop you!"

The prolific trailer for Swimfan may be the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen. We have all, of course, had experience with movie advertising that gives away chunks of the plot that should have remained concealed, but never before have I witnessed a trailer that takes us, in sequence, through the story, through the false climax and into the real climax in the span of its two minutes. There are a limited number of explanations for such a marketing move. One is that the filmmakers are confident that we have seen this story before, and, as this is a thinly-veiled teen remake of Fatal Attraction, we pretty much have. Another is that there is so little in the movie to actually show that the trailer has to mine all of its parts to come up with something even remotely enticing.

In this case, I think, both are true. Swimfan is one of those quick-buck thrillers in which unreasonably attractive actors in their mid 20s play high school teenagers who find themselves having to elude a psychopath/alien/ghost/forest spirit. It is no worse than the average of the genre, but it is one of the most unremarkable, garden-variety installments I've seen. Actor-turned-director John Polson manages to milk some interesting scenes out of the dead-in-the-water script in his movie's first half before going entirely on auto-pilot in the second, and the movie isn't a spectacular disaster so much as a mediocre bore. A disaster may have been more interesting.

Ben Cronin (Jesse Bradford) is the star swimmer in his high school, and Swimfan chronicles the week preceding a swim meet at which he is to be observed by Stanford recruiters. We learn that Ben used to be a pretty bad kid; we get vague information to the effect that he was doing some drugs which "led to" stealing, which led to 6 months in juvenile hall. He's reformed now, with a gorgeous girlfriend named Amy (Shiri Appleby) to whom he is devoted and a real prospect for a swimming career, or at least admission to a top university.

Enter Madison Bell (Erika Christensen, following up a spectacular turn in Traffic), the new girl in school who begins by asking Ben to help her with his locker and ends up seducing him in the pool in the middle of the night. They swear not to tell anyone about their, ahem, one night swim, and Ben hopes that his relationship with Amy can continue unhindered. Alas, Madison refuses to accept that their transgression was a one-time affair and starts to do increasingly outrageous things to get Ben to acknowledge her.

There simply aren't very many directions to go with this plot. While Swimfan at first dabbles in the intriguing concept that Madison is little more than a desperate, obsessed teenager, it eventually takes the most generic way out, and becomes a fairly retarded slasher/psychopath movie, which isn't nearly as interesting as any other alternative. Worse, it's a psychopath movie without any kind of twist on the genre, nor even any creative dispatchings of the inevitable victims. Erika Christensen, an obviously talented actress, gives a performance that's convincing when her character is supposed to be quietly, innocently menacing; she more or less falls apart when she has to let loose.

The film is also an editing nightmare, with Polson and editor Sarah Flack both making mistakes and employing hideous stylistic devices that only look like mistakes. The most prominent of these gross miscalculations is the propensity to cut between different shots from the same angle whenever a Shocking Revelation is made or a Big Moment occurs. It just looks odd, especially considering that Polson has absolutely nothing else to distinguish him as a director.

Swimfan was dumped into theaters during the doldrums of mid-September, with only that idiotically revealing trailer to herald its arrival. I didn't expect much, and didn't get it. I suppose the best thing that can be said about this tepid teen thriller is that I've seen far worse movies, both in its genre and out. I see far better ones every week.