From time to time, one cannot fail to run into bitter disappointments that shake one's faith in all sacred things such as trust, hope, and, in this case, good film-making. Excuse me this rant, but from my earlier experience with this director (Mikael Håfström), I was led to expect a remarkable movie experience: perhaps not necessarily anything as brilliant and insightful as Ondskan, but still something out of ordinary, original and tactful, as European movies aspire to be.All my expectations were flawed, however, completely destroyed and torn to little shreds of contempt. It seems to the movie deliberately sabotaged itself, opting to follow a by now more than exhausted trend of the America-Teen-Slasher which feels ill at ease in a Swedish setting and, in this adaption of what was not a praise-worthy effort to begin it, fail to follow the thriller-by-number with any amount of narrative coherent or scenic competence.The plot is formulaic: a predictable ensemble of characters set in a prestigious college (the building itself having a great potential for being a new Overlook, but, alas, it is completely wasted in this movie) wrapped up with a "mysterious" murder committed a hundred years ago, a pseudo paranormal demonstration, a suicide and an investigation undertaken by the said characters which, by the way, are nothing but one dimensional personality traits, not even stressed enough to be called clichés, one could say they are underdeveloped ideas.Of course, plot twists abound, none of them strike as fresh or even as surprising. Half-ways through, the movie takes a turn and tries to explore some psychological drama, which makes the final work even more flawed and utterly clueless.*****Mild Spoilers*****It should be stressed that nothing rings original in this mess. The ending is so reminiscent of Friday the 13th that it is nothing short of uncanny, a previous scene is a watered down version of something straight out of Seven, and I am quite sure the list could go on.Lovers of gore be warned, this movie has none. It is, however, peopled with silly to borderline intelligent characters who believe that staring and trying to reason with an armed murderer is quite a plausible excuse to get themselves killed.I truly hope that Mikael Håfström will find his way back to brilliance and quit this emulation of American cinema at its worst.

This is the first or at least one of the first "teen hack" productions from Sweden.I've seen a lot of the usual teen hack Hollywood productions such as "Scream" one to three. It is not my favorite kind of genre, I admit to that. The Hollywood productions mostly seems to handle this type of genre well enough. The scripting of these movies are quite good, the acting is often good and the movie elements are quite often timed well enough to create a fairly intense and scary atmosphere. So here we are with the first Swedish production of a teen hack movie.How did it fare you wonder? As you might expect, quite bad, I believe anyways. The story is average, early planting a myth of a ghostly killer on a path of revenge. The acting is quite good actually with a lot of the Swedish young "elite" in the acting ensemble. They perform well I think so a big + to them. The "planting" (the element you plant early in a scene to make the viewer slightly aware that something is awry thereby increasing the tension in the movie and later reap the benefits by creating a scary finish) is terrible. *SPOILER* The first example of this is when a student early in the movie talks to the porter of the school wanting his cell -phone and some stuff from the basement. The student heads down the basement... The killer of the movie now grabs the keys to the basement door. Unnecessary... You already know that this kid is "gonna get it". This kind of planting is not needed at all. And examples like this seems to be "haunting" this movie all the way through. Anyways... Sweden's got a bobsleigh team...

Yet another generic Hollywood teen-slasher with lots of attractive kids getting picked off at a boarding school... except its not a Hollywood slasher, its Swedish! Of course its fun to see this kind of genre film coming out of Scandinavia, but its less fun when its simply aping Kevin Williamson films and borrowing heavily from Friday the 13th (the "lake" motif et al). Any unique Swedish identity is lost as it slavishly follows all the standard clichés of the genre: lots of confusing back-story to uncover, difficult-to-distinguish characters who exist solely to get killed etc etc.Its disappointing that Swedish genre cinema has regressed to this after the awesome high-point of 2002's DEN OSYNLIGE, which similarly dealt with ghosts and teen murder but in a brilliantly original, fantastically entertaining manner that did not feel the need to follow any established genre rules or conventions. THE DROWNING GHOST's "by-the-book" cookie cutter approach ultimately means it will be ignored by any potential international audience in favour of identical Hollywood teen slashers, simply because they happen to be in English.

Strandvaskaren is one of the very few Swedish horror movies in existence, this does not make it good in any way. The potential of the movie is fairly good. Old ghoulish folklore can always be used to create a great horror flick, but the director has made some incredible faults. The sounds is bad... The effects are cheesy and bad at best. When a knife cuts someone it usually has blood on it? LOL. The actors does an okay job with a quite bad script. So I really don't have any heavy complaints there.But still its fun to see a Swedish horror movie, I hope that more will be done but this movie was a complete waste of time. I gave it 3/10 and consider it to be almost a to high number.