20130928: Horror Review--The Pact

The Pact

1. Fundamentals
1. American live action feature length film, released in 2012, rated R, 89 minutes, horror, mystery, thriller.
2. IMDB: 5.7/10.0 from 11,034 users.  Estimated budget of 'low.'  That was the consensus.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 67% on the meter; 41% liked it from 8,241 audience ratings.
4. Written and directed by Nicholas McCarthy.
5. Starring: Caity Lotz as Annie, Casper Van Dien as Bill Creek (policeman), Kathleen Rose Perkins as Liz, Agnes Bruckner as Nicole Bellows, Haley Hudson as Stevie (psychic).


2. Setup and Plot
1. Annie feels she needs to go home for the funeral of her mother, whom she blames for her drug addiction of four years before.


2. Annie experiences several cliches of the supernatural: framed pictures fall off the wall, leaving broken glass; jars pop out of the refrigerator; boxes fall off of shelves, spilling open and dumping their contents.


3. Things do not get better for Annie after viewing the corpse at the mortuary.


4. She gets attacked by something with poltergeist effects.  She survives this, and gets Liz out.


5. She meets Bill Creek at the police station; Bill's familiar with Annie's sister Nicole.  Annie moves to a motel; Liz gets absorbed into public services.  She hallucinates being attacked, then wakes up scared.  She gets on a motorcycle and prepares to drive off in her T-shirt and panties.  Great stuff.  A child in an adjoining motel room reminds her to wear a helmet, and Merry Christmas.  Nice.


6. Somehow (right) papers are left in her purse, which she discovers at a diner.  They indicate an extra room in her mother's house.  She goes there with Bill, and they open up the room, which is quite underwhelming.


7. She goes to visit Stevie, who is supposedly a psychic.  Stevie gets nothing at first, then noses around to a room where Annie's mother put the children when the were bad.


8. Stevie riffs on "Judas!"  and convulses.  She and Stevie and Stevie's assistant all see a vision of a woman in a white and red dress in the room.  Annie searches on the Internet; finds there was a San Pedro serial killer named Judas.  She sees a picture of the dead body of the last known victim of Judas.  It matches the vision.


9. Annie finds the location of a picture someone has e-mailed her on her cell phone.  The picture had an image of the last victim.  At the actual site, Annie sees nothing out of the ordinary.


10. Bill takes a camera to the house.  He sees lighted areas through the camera that he does not see directly with his eyes.  Hm.  The spirit or whatever strikes (weapon was unknown) Bill in the carotid; he bleeds out.


11. Stevie tells Annie how to make a do-it-yourself ouija board, which she does in the room where the punishments took place.  She starts seeing the man whom her research indicates is Judas.  So...is it a ghost, or is it a real live serial killer?  The question seems open, and the visual effects as the killer died reinforce that.


12. Toward the end the killer is shown to have complete heterochromia, just as Annie does.
    


3. Conclusions
1. One sentence summary: Thriller or supernatural horror is the ambiguity; tepid is the execution.
2. Three stars of five


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 7/10  Varies.  Some of it is clear, well-framed, good focus.  Other parts are dark past where the cameras can handle it---the end product is pixelated.


2. Sound: 4/10 Horribly variable.  During normal conversation, I needed volume at 40 on my set to barely hear the words; during music or 'psychic' encounters, 10 was too loud.  Bad sound is tough to forget.


3. Acting: 5/10 Casper Van Dien is the only actor I recognize; he did a good job, and I wish his part had been bigger.  I hope Caity Lotz is better in future films.  The other actors may as well have been desk chairs.


4. Screenplay: 7/10 Are the drivers in the film (a) mental illness (b) crafty serial killer or (c) supernatural forces ?  Apparently the film chose (b), since the cops did not throw her in jail, social services let her have her child back, and a bank gave her money for selling the house.  The obligatory cliche final scene did not register as a plus for me.