Movie Spotlight: The Pact

The Pact is a 2012 movie starring Caity Lotz, Agnes Bruckner, Kathleen Rose Perkins, Casper Van Dien, Haley Hudson, Dakota Bright, Samuel Ball, Mark Steger, and Bo Barrett.  Nicole Barlow (Agnes Bruckner) has returned to her childhood home in San Pedro, California, for her mother's funeral.  She calls her sister Annie (Caity Lotz), who says she doesn't want to attend the funeral because of the way their mother treated them.  Nicole is talking to her daughter Eva (Dakota Bright) on video chat, walking around with the laptop to get a better connection, when Eva asks, "Who's that behind you?" The connection is lost, and Nicole notices an open door; she enters the dark room.  The next day, Annie arrives at the house, and Nicole is nowhere to be found; she hears a phone ringing and finds Nicole's cell phone and a picture of her mother and another woman, taken while they were both pregnant.  Annie attends the funeral and returns to her mother's house with her cousin Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins) and Eva, who Annie is meeting for the first time.  That night Annie dreams about a crying man, and a map pops up on her phone; when she wakes up, she sees someone in the hallway, so she checks Liz's room and discovers that Liz is not in her bed.  Annie is attacked by something she can't see, and she manages to get away and escape the house with Eva.  The police don't believe Annie when she tells them what happens, and they think she might be behind the disappearances of Liz and Nicole.  When Annie goes to a motel, she notices the map on her phone, and when she searches for the pinned address, a picture of a woman in a floral dress shows up; that night she dreams about the crying man again, and this time a decapitated woman in a floral dress also appears in the dream. The next day Annie returns to her mother's house with Officer Creek (Casper Van Dien), and she finds a room she has never seen before.  Since the police aren't taking her seriously, Annie gets a psychic named Stevie (Haley Hudson) to come to the house; in the newly discovered room, Stevie starts having convulsions and screams the word "Judas" over and over again, then a dead woman in a floral dress appears above them.  Annie does some research trying to find out who Judas is and how he's connected to her mother's house, and she's shocked by what she discovers.

The Pact isn't terribly exciting or scary, but it was pretty well-written compared to many of the paranormal movies I've seen.  I'm not sure I liked it enough to watch the sequel though.

My rating: 6.5/10

Rifftrax Live!: Starship Troopers

Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Rifftrax Live!: Starship Troopers.  For those of you who have never heard of Rifftrax, it's like Mystery Science Theater 3000, but without robots...and it's from the same people (Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett), so if you like MST3K, you'll like Rifftrax.  Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett watched and commented on the movie at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, Tennessee and beamed it to other movie theaters via a live satellite feed...which is why we missed about ten minutes of the movie when a storm knocked out the satellite reception.  In case any of you haven't seen Starship Troopers, here's a little background info: it came out in 1997, stars Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris, and Dina Meyer, and is about humans going to war with aliens. I've watched a bunch of alien movies, and the aliens in Starship Troopers have got to be the grossest ones I've ever seen...most of them are giant bugs, and the big one at the end kind of looks like a butt!  It was a fun movie (though I thought it needed more Neil Patrick Harris and less scenes of people fighting bug aliens) with impressive special effects, and I'll probably watch it again soon since it was hard to hear a lot of the dialogue over the commentary.  The commentary was the reason I paid $12.50 per ticket for a movie I'm pretty sure we already have at home, and it was hilarious...I wish Rifftrax would do one of these in theaters at least once a month because I would go see any movie that's getting the Rifftrax treatment. : )

Movie: 7/10
Rifftrax commentary: 10/10

http://www.rifftrax.com/