Review No.113: The Pact

If there's one genre I'm particularly picky with its horror as I don't find I scare too easily as we're now well over the 100 film mark the only film that I felt had some genuine scares in it was The Woman in Black however my experience of that was marred by the disrespectful half term audience. I find most horror, especially American horror, to be fairly generic offering cheap shocks rather than fully-rounded characters who I can care about. The Pact follows in this tradition as we open on a shot of a green eye which eventually we find out belongs to Nicole Barlow who is back at her old family home sorting out stuff ahead of her mother's funeral however when she tries to convince sister Annie to join her she gets a negative response. As this is a modern horror a webchat between Nicole and her daughter Eva, who is currently staying with her cousin Liz, reveals that she is not alone when her daughter asks her 'who's that behind you mummy!' Flash forward to the funeral and we see Annie all clad in bike leathers back at the house with Liz now looking after Eva ever since Nicole's supposed disappearance. Though at first the sceptical Annie believes that her sister has simply taken off she begins to think that something is amiss after spending some time at the house before her suspicions are confirmed when Liz goes missing and Eva is taken in by the police. Its up to Casper Van Dien's police officer to try and calm Annie down however after several bad dreams he caves and they go to the house where he takes some pictures of a room that she never knew existed. Obviously this room has some family secrets hidden within it that Annie must unlock so with the help of an old school friend, who conveinently can talk to the dead, as well as a ouija board she finds out things about her heritage that maybe should've stayed buried and as this is a horror film we are all in for one final shock.

It seems to me nowadays that any director making a modern American horror film has a checklist that he or she must go through in order to satisfy the studio. In the case of The Pact's director Nicholas McCarthy he can cross off scenes in which lights flicker, one in which a psychic has a seizure, one in which the ineffectual police officer tells the lead woman to calm down and that one final predictable shock that everybody saw coming. The problem with The Pact is that nothing much happens in the quiet scenes to justify me caring all that much when something happens to the characters during the loud scary moments. To be fair all of the cast have the courage of their convictions with lead actress Caity Loitz being at least sympathetic as Annie which is good as she is in nearly every scene sometimes all by herself. Other than Loitz's performance there's not much else to like about The Pact which lurches from one clichéd scene to the next while Van Dien's police officer really doesn't get a lot to do before his inevitable conclusion. It's not that I'm not a horror fan it's just that I want something more than an attractive blonde wandering round a secret room waiting to be killed however I didn't get anything more than that from The Pact.

Verdict: A good turn from lead actress Caity Loitz is not enough to save this boring film which should've been consigned to the straight-to-DVD section so for that reason it only gets a 3.5/10