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83More horror movies set in the 21st century ought to integrate technology into their scares as well as Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact.
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63Familiar elements such as a dark family secret, a ghost and a Ouija board start to seem trite after a while, and the third act is a little ridiculous, but debut writer-director Nicholas McCarthy does a lot with a little and seems fully prepared to handle a big-studio horror project.
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Jul 2, 201263When The Pact descends, finally, from suggestion to explication, the scares regrettably slink away.
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60In the end, like a lot of genre movies, this one pulls from different inspirations, and so weighs in, by turns, as overly predictable and satisfyingly recognizable (part of genre cinema's one-two punch).
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60For her part, Lotz carries the load with such briskly efficient confidence, it's no surprise to learn that she's already got several more movies on the way.
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60It works hard, and the first half hour is textbook creepy, but the oldschool grab-bag of shocks struggles to jolt a dour script to life.
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50The Pact demonstrates both why people respond to horror and why it's so routinely scorned.
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40A musty ghost story that morphs into a sluggish serial-killer mystery, Nicholas McCarthy's film tries to distinguish itself by minimizing dialogue and settings, a stripped-down approach that extends to sketchy characters and a script rife with convenient, easy-to-assemble clues.
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Jul 3, 201240Lotz's grudging fortitude provides enough engagement to let you overlook the cracks in the film's facade, but when she cedes the screen to Casper Van Dien's thick-witted police detective, all you can see are the gaps.
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40Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact is a horror film developed from a short, and unfortunately it splits apart while being stretched out to feature length.