Delayed Reaction: The Pact

Premise: After her sister goes missing in the house they grew up in, a woman investigates a mysterious evil coming from there.

 

The home I grew up in was a simple 3 bedroom, 1 bath, single story house. It's a moderately-sized house. Not much to it. For the first 8 years of my life, I was convinced we had a basement. I just decided we had one. Other people had basements. We should too. Maybe there was a door that my parents missed. I remember thinking our hallway was so long that there had to be space between the kitchen and bathroom for there to be a hidden door and staircase. Also, simply being a child, I had a curiosity to explore everything. Even my own tiny closet was a new world to explore.

 

What I'm trying to say is, I was a child, and you couldn't sneak a fake hidden room by me. The entirety of The Pact relies on the idea that young children grew up in a modest sized house with a secret room that they never noticed. And that's just the tip of it. A man had to be able to live in the room unnoticed for decades, still finding time to murder people...I...I just can't with this movie. That's too much to ask from me. Perhaps I'm just jealous that this house actually did have as secret room. Even if I could forgive young children for not noticing the huge gap in the floor plan, certainly teens would. Definitely adults. I would notice that immediately when I came back to the house for the first time in years. "Why's there a big gap in the middle of this house?"

 

There's a lot of other stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why's it called The Pact? Is it Caity Lotz's pact to never return to the house? I don't remember such a pact being made. Is it the pact Lotz's mother made to hide her murderous brother? I don't think that's a pact, really. The answer is that the title is mysterious and simple, which studios like for horror movies.

 

This is also an inexplicably supernatural horror movie. A lot of movies do this. It works for many premises. The Conjuring is a haunted house. Being supernatural is the cause of the scares. In The Ring, Samara is a supernatural force causing all this. But what's the reason for a supernatural force dragging Lotz in this movie? Her uncle is a murderer, not a wizard. All the supernatural elements are just included to add scares and intrigue. They don't make any sense for the plot.

 

As you can tell, I didn't care much for this movie (which is going to make my next movie choice very confusing). It fits in that genre that I'm now calling "R-rated Lifetime Horror movie". It plays like a movie of the week. It stars people who are recognizable more than famous. The story plays out like it was one of ten written from an exec pitch session. With how much success horror has when looking cheap, I don't understand these low-budget horror movies that try to look like a major studio horror movie.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend