The Pact (2012)

"As a woman struggles to come to grips with her past in the wake of her mother's death, an unsettling presence emerges in her childhood home."

Ah, the old bait and switch. I only wanted to watch "The Pact" to see more of Agnes Bruckner, but she was only in it for just over six minutes. Then it was all down to Caity Lotz to carry the rest of the film.

I was impressed by the casting since Anges Bruckner and Caity Lotz physically matched each other really well as sisters. Caity Lotz was a little bit more freckly and didn't have lots of nasty tattoos of crucifixes all over her, but they still could have been siblings in real life.

As for the story, well, it was okay even though it seemed to take forever to get to where it was going. For something so ridiculously predictable, I suppose the writer/director, Nicholas McCarthy, tried to add a couple of original touches to the formula, but they just made things unnecessarily unfocused and slightly confusing.

The jump scares were nicely done. The one with "Global Maps" (no prizes for guessing that it was really "Google Maps" rebranded) caught me out even though I half-expected it. I had my pizza plate in front of my monitor as I watched this on my computer so I was up real close and personal at that moment. That was by far the best bit though.

Another surprise for me was seeing Casper Van Dien is something other than a SyFy movie again. Without the grey in his beard, he's hardly changed at all over the years. He probably has a magic portrait hidden in his attic or something. I thought he did quite well as the cop in this and I was a bit sorry to see the end of his character. His was the only character that I cared about.

The big twist (which wasn't really a twist) turned out to be far too like a certain movie from 1989 starring Gary Busey, and that knocked a lot of points from my final rating. Up until that point, I would have said that "The Pact" was just below average. The fact that a supernatural entity wasn't singly responsible for everything meant that it was a total disaster.

Here's the thing. There was a ghost in the house which could move objects and violently drag people around yet it couldn't do anything to its own murderer? That made no sense to me and, nor, for that matter, did the epilogue. Once again, a horror movie missed its punchline by continuing to ramble on for another ten minutes.

I was actually looking forward to "The Pact" but, overall, it was a huge disappointment caused by inept directing, bad pacing, and really weak characterisation. Some of the camerawork left a lot to be desired as well.