‘The Covenant’

Eerie music and mysterious foggy emanations, plus a few spiders, are about as scary as it gets – creepy is as creepy does.

By: Bob Brown
   The opening credits of this spook-genre film promise an action-packed, thrilling movie, harking back to the Salem witch trials of 17th-centry New England. A very clever montage of antique books and woodcuts is animated to a snappy score. The music is by the duo tomandandy — Tom Hajdu and Andy Milburn — who met while graduate students in music at Princeton University. But the promise of the opening soon withers.
   After 10 minutes or so, the rest of the film, from the hands of Finnish director Renny Harlin (Exorcist: The Beginning) and writer J. S. Cardone (The Marksman), sputters to a muddy halt. The producers have freighted the story with a confusing plot and what they think will appeal to a teenage audience: a quartet of hunky leading men and a couple of attractive young women who are roommates at Spenser Academy, a posh prep school in Massachusetts (actually Quebec, to save on production costs).
   A lot of back story must be filled in for the plot to make what little sense it does. The 17th-century witches of Ipswich Colony live on in 21st-century Massachusetts, but in spirit. To avoid being burned at the stake, four of the accused Ipswich families swore a covenant to secrecy and went underground. Each first-born male of succeeding generations must assume the mantle of secret powers along with the burden of curbing one’s appetite to use them for ill.
   With power comes the addictive desire to abuse it and risk exposure. And, with overuse, the body is prematurely aged. (Might there also arise hair on the palms? Hmm.) The four modern Sons of Ipswich are Pogue (Taylor Kitsch), Reid (Toby Hemingway), Tyler (Chace Crawford) and Caleb (Steven Strait).
   To spice things up, Caleb falls instantly for Sarah (Laura Ramsey), a new transfer to the school whom he meets at a midnight bonfire. Meanwhile, Sara’s roommate, Kate (Jessica Lucas), is contending with a jealous boyfriend, Pogue, who is angry that she has a new friendship with Chase (Sebastian Stan), another fresh arrival at the school.
   One odd thing about this school is we seldom see it in daylight, and except for the close circle of friends, the residential halls seem bereft of students. The better to spook you with, my dear, if you’re faint of heart. Eerie music and mysterious foggy emanations, plus a few spiders, are about as scary as it gets. Creepy is as creepy does. There’s the obligatory I’m-alone-in-the-shower-at-night-and-something-is-coming-through-the-door scene, but the payoff is a dud. All that adrenaline has no place to go.
   The bulk of the time is spent watching the Sons of Ipswich get into jealous dustups whenever they’re out in public. It’s such a bother keeping a lid on one’s superpowers. Caleb, the oldest, is about to "ascend" on his 18th birthday to the level of highest power, and someone is trying to stop him.
   But who? Is it Reid? And who’s trying to off his girlfriend’s roommate with a nasty spider attack? Who cares? The mystery and the suspense seem secondary: as the producer, Tom Rosenberg, indicates in production notes, he was drawn to the project because it deals with the real social issues of addiction and teenagers’ sense of invincibility. That in itself is a scary combination. But it was much scarier in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000), where you need only two attractive young people (Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly) to slam the point home.
   By shooting in Montreal instead of the U.S., the company could get the benefit of Canadian talent, like cinematographer Pierre Gil (he did a 2002 TV film, Salem Witch Trials). They also used a computer-driven cable system employed by Cirque du Soleil, to choreograph the characters’ ballet of violence. You get the usual Matrix-like leaps and flips by two guys trying to tear each other’s throats out. Hand-to-hand combat is now too pretty.
   What you don’t get is much sense of forward motion, so the fight scenes seem almost an afterthought. Will they never come? When they do, the effects are on the mild side. How excited can you be by two demented Warlocks tossing what seem to be transparent balls of pure quivering power at each other’s solar plexus? One effect that hurts the actors more than scares the audience is those Warlock eyes. When they’re shooting daggers at a target, Warlocks’ eyeballs blacken, thanks to excruciating plastic inserts.
   The young cast members are all very good-looking and talented. No doubt they’ll eventually get the parts and scripts they deserve, but not this time. With this movie they’ve fallen into pit of quicksand that pulls their work down to wherever bad, unredeemable movies go. Please — I want my horror flicks to be pure and unadulterated by an omniscient social conscience.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images, sexual content, partial nudity and language.