At the end of Nicholas McCarthy’s The Pact, Annie (Caity Lotz) killed the Judas Killer, her crazed uncle responsible for the decapitation of several women over several decades. Annie was ready to move on, but Evil (or, more accurately, film studio economic interest) wasn’t done with her. McCarthy bailed on making a sequel, leaving Dallas Richard Hallam and Patrick Horvath to take over writing and directing duties. Hallam and Horvath aren’t a bad choice; their first film Entrance is a bit of a misfire, but its stubborn dedication to low-key horror made it an admirable failure. That restrained form of filmmaking falls in line with the slow burn quality of McCarthy’s film, except Hallam and Horvath fail to replicate anything close to what made its predecessor effective.

Lotz, doing her best take on Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, doesn’t show up until the halfway mark. The main character this time around is June (Camilla Luddington), a crime scene cleaner, and her police officer boyfriend Daniel (Scott Michael Foster, seen mostly entering or leaving their house). Daniel works on a homicide matching the Judas Killer’s MO, while June suffers from nightmares looking awfully similar to the crime scene. It isn’t until FBI profiler Ballard (Patrick Fischler, unsure whether to ham it up or go method) explains what’s going on that the pieces begin falling into place. June’s biological mother was one of Judas’ victims, making June fearful that the killer’s spirit has latched on to her. June begins experiencing hauntings, and as her nightmares grow in intensity more bodies pile up.

The film’s first half is loosely connected to The Pact, making this story feel retrofitted into a clear attempt at building a VOD franchise. Swap the Judas Killer with any other made up serial psychopath, and no one would notice. That wouldn’t be a bad thing if the storyline had any vitality in it. The murky, ugly cinematography goes well with the film’s plodding narrative, setting up a boring mystery none of the characters look particularly interested in solving. For a brief moment it looks like Hallam and Horvath introduce the idea of June committing these murders in her sleep, but that possibility slowly fades away, acting like a half-assed red herring. It’s lazy writing, giving off the impression that Hallam and Horvath have no clue what they’re trying to do. McCarthy’s script for The Pact, while full of its own issues, looks masterful next to this messy attempt at a sequel.

Once Annie comes back into the picture, The Pact 2 shows a brief flicker of life, the kind of fun familiarity from seeing old characters pop up again. That flicker vanishes once it’s apparent that Hallam and Horvath just want to remake The Pact in 45 minutes. The exact same story beats and plot twists as the first film happen here, only this time applied to June instead of Annie. And by lazily slapping a newer, weaker coat of paint over the old one, The Pact 2 devolves into complete nonsense by its climax, throwing in plot twists just for the sake of it. It’s bad enough that Hallam and Horvath can’t do a good job with their own original story in the sequel; even when directly copying the first film, they still screw it up.

Scares are mostly absent here. Carl Sondrol’s score throws screeching strings and booming percussion over scenes in an attempt to freak viewers out. The score actually hurts the effectiveness of the horror, especially during one sequence involving a shadow. If anything the music signals overcompensation on the filmmakers’ part, that they aren’t confident enough in their abilities to unnerve. That lack of confidence runs throughout The Pact 2. McCarthy’s film certainly showed confidence through its direction; the same can’t be said for Hallam and Horvath. The Pact 2 is an amateur, stale follow-up, an attempt to start another low rent, low quality series of horror films to profit from bored Netflix subscribers. The film’s ending, a warning from one character that “it’s starting again,” all but confirms a third Pact will be on its way if The Pact 2 proves successful enough. That thought alone is scarier than anything in this film.

The Pact 2 trailer

After getting a warm reception at Sundance in 2011 with his short film of the same title, Nicholas McCarthy was able to get funding for a feature-length expansion of his short. One year later McCarthy came back to Sundance to premiere The Pact in their midnight line-up. I wouldn’t know how the two versions compare to each other (the short doesn’t look like it’s available to watch anywhere) but it feels like The Pact might have worked better as a short.

The film opens with a woman (Agnes Bruckner) arguing with her sister Annie (Caity Lotz) on the phone over their recently deceased mother. Annie refuses to help because of their abusive upbringing, forcing her sister to take care of everything at their mother’s house. Eventually Annie makes her way down to help out, but when she arrives her sister has disappeared without a trace. It doesn’t take long before weird things start happening at the mother’s house, but soon Annie’s cousin and niece come and visit. At this point Annie realizes something’s terrible going on when her cousin vanishes and she is literally thrown around the house by some sort of entity. Annie teams up with a cop (Casper Van Dien, sounding like Batman) and start to discover the true history behind her family and the house while looking for her sister and cousin.

It’s evident from the beginning that McCarthy’s strengths lie behind the camera instead of on the page. The house, an ordinary looking bungalow in California, feels like the kind of place anyone’s been in when visiting an old relative and McCarthy milks this feeling for all its worth. There are plenty of scenes in the first act where the camera follows characters around the house that, when someone pulls out the floor plan of the house in a later scene, it’s as familiar to us as it is to Annie.

The movie’s murky look, reminiscent of the kind of low-budget horror movies you would find at the video store, is one of The Pact’s strongest qualities. There’s an uneasy mood that comes from it, and it helps build up the slow burning quality to a lot of scenes in the first half (The fact that McCarthy builds certain scenes around cell phones, laptops and other pieces of technology is one of the more interesting parts of the movie. If you took those elements away, I wouldn’t be surprised if people thought this was made in the 1990s).

It’s unfortunate then that, with the good directorial talent on hand, the script comes up short. Almost everything in The Pact has been seen before, from the violent ghost that might actually be trying to help to the kooky medium and running across town to pick up clues. There’s a sequence where Annie contacts a girl she knew from high school (Haley Hudson) who might be able to talk to the dead that’s completely baffling from its after-school special setting of what looks like a crack house to the girl’s boyfriend/assistant who acts like he’s about to rip off someone’s head at any second. Once a surprising reveal is shown off in the final act (and the simplicity of this reveal is probably the movie’s scariest moment) things began looking up again until it dished out another set of clichés.

If Nicholas McCarthy is able to work on his writing a little more and try to avoid genre conventions as much as possible, he could be a horror director to look out for in the future. There is a lot of potential shown in The Pact, but the clunky writing and bombardment of clichés end up overshadowing the better qualities of the film.