WATER

DRIP DRIP DRIP SPOILERS DRIP

Too long even at an hour and forty, indifferently performed, increasingly silly, full of unbelievable characters and a plot that makes no sense. Water is a thunderously terrible vengeful ghost yarn with nothing to commend it but the fantastic architecture of the House Where Something Unspeakable Happened. Once more, the location is doing a lot of the heavy lifting and this one weighs an absolute ton.

Some time after the original owner (top-billed Lorenzo Lamas) had run off with the insurance money after killing his wife, the apparently unsellable house is bought by a B-movie scriptwriter (why isn't he living in Los Angeles?) and his wife, even after the initial Stay Away omen of their toddler daughter falling in the swimming pool within minutes of arriving. Realising immediately that something is wrong, they seek to have the house blessed, but the multi-faith (and multi-tattooed) minister disappears. The daughter, who's apparently aged about seven years in just a few weeks, has a "friend" who lives in the swimming pool... Maybe the ginormous handyman, forever tending to the plants and talking to himself, knows more than he's saying?

No-one seems to have the internet in 2018, but they do have a fax machine; auteur Phillip Penza decorates the hero's office with posters of his own works, Tales From The Crypt: Bordello Of Blood gets namechecked for no good reason, the handyman drops in a couple of random celebrity impressions, the film stops rather than ends, and the hero's London accent is left unexplained. Throw in some frankly unappetising nudity (not wishing to be ungallant, but please put them back on) and a genuinely gratuitous knob shot and the result is the least rewarding Saturday morning I've spent in quite a while.

*