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Released by: Saturn’s Core Releasing
Released on: February 14th, 2023.
Director: Brad Sykes
Cast: Dawn Soleri, Brett Edenton, DeAnna Day, Jack Wareing
Year: 1995
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The Pact – Movie Review:
1995’s The Pact opens with a prologue where a troubled young woman walks the beach and takes solace in a partially finished house where she talks to herself about her problems. When she mentions she'd rather die than deal with them, she drops her cigarette, blood drips from the ceiling and she vanishes from the screen.
From here, a beautiful young woman named Andrea Graves (Dawn Soleri) winds up getting a letter letting her know that her great grandmother, Bianca Charnel, has passed away. The silver lining to her passing is that Andrea inherits the older woman’s nineteenth century house, located right on the picturesque shore of the Atlantic Ocean. It needs a whole lot of work – it seems to be mostly plywood, it is full of dead birds and we’re told that the city has condemned it - but the house in a fantastic location, but what Andrea doesn’t realize is that this place is known around town as ‘The Charnel House’ and potentially for good reason. A strange man named Alvin (Jack Wareing) tries to warn her about it but the real estate agent, Joe (Joe Marino), chases him off. She explains everything to her big-haired friend, Vic (Brett Edenton), who hands her a photograph she hasn't seen in ten years that he found while cleaning up. She's grateful, but tells him she intends to move into the house, even if he's kind of confused by this decision.
Regardless, Andrea, who starts having weird dreams and who is experiencing gaps in her memory, starts to get a bit obsessed with the house but, of course, it isn’t long before strange and possibly supernatural things start happening to her and around her. Meanwhile, her relationship with Vic becomes more than plutonic. She soon ties some of the strange events to a mirror in the house which seems to allow people and spirits alike to travel back and forth between the land of the living and the land of the dead, and it would seem that the dead want to take over the house. To sort all of this out, Andrea tries to contact a woman named Delphine Duchamp (DeAnna Day), the only problem with this? She’s been dead for over a century.
Made in 1995 but not released until 2013 when SRS Cinema put it out on DVD, The Pact is an interesting early micro budget shot on video offering from Sykes, who would go on to make quite a name for himself in the low budget horror movie world over the past few decades. Best known for the first two Camp Blood movies and 2002’s Scream Queen with Linnea Quigley, The Pact sees Sykes still figuring things out but even here, early on in his career, he shows some promise. The script, also from Sykes, is more interesting than your average nineties SOV horror picture, working some Euro-horror influences into things and going for a more cerebral take on the story than you’d likely expect. The beachside setting and the partially finished house (which doesn’t look nearly as old as it is supposed to be, but we’ll let that slide) give the movie some nice production value and there was clearly some care and effort put into the cinematography and lightning even if it can’t hide the fact that this was made on an insanely low budget.
The acting is better than what you’ll see in most SOV movies, Soleri in particular does a pretty nice job here. She looks great and her performance is well-handled and fairly believable. Edenton isn’t bad either, though he looks like such a stereotypical nineties ‘alternative rock guy’ that it’s hard not to be distracted by that. The supporting players are alright as well, with Wareing doing a nice job of chewing a bit of scenery and creating an interesting weirdo with his character.
The Pact – Blu-ray Review:
The Pact arrives on Blu-ray in its proper 1.33.1 aspect ratio in an AVC encoded 1080i high definition transfer with the feature taking up just shy of 18.4GBs of space on the 25GB disc. There’s no denying that this looks like the micro-budget camcorder epic that it is, so expect the image to look soft throughout with some visible color fading noticeable throughout. But hey, it is what it is, given the elements that exist this isn’t likely to look any better than it does, nor does it really need to. If nothing else, this is would seem to be a pretty accurate representation of the source material available.
Audio chores are handled by a 16-bit DTS-HD 2.0 mix in the film’s native English, with optional subtitles provided in English only. The score sounds pretty solid here but there’s some background noise and hiss noticeable throughout pretty much the entire duration of the movie. Again, this is a case of doing the best you can with the elements available. It certainly isn’t perfect, but it gets the job done.
The main extra on this release is a new 2022 audio commentary with writer / director Brad Sykes that covers pretty much everything that you'd want it to. He talks about shooting the movie in his home town of Virginia Beach in the summer of 1995, who did the titles for the movie, the different locations used for the movie, going to film school at Boston University starting in 1993 but writing scripts to shoot in the Virginia Beach area during summer or breaks from school, getting access to video editing gear around this time, where he got the inspiration to make the movie, shooting without permits or insurance, getting into trouble for shooting without permission, casting the movie and working with the different actors, the influence of Daughters Of Darkness and Rollin's Living Dead Girl, trying to make the most of the production value at their disposal, the challenges that shooting a movie with no money presented, never really intending to get the movie a commercial release and plenty more.
The disc also includes Tears, a short film that Brad Sykes made in 1997. This twenty-two minute short film follows a young woman named Lydia (Ruth Ann Schultz) who arrives at a beach house. She wanders around a bit and then sees a strange man on the beach (Jack Wareing) who turns out to be named Max. Lydia is suicidal and we see her attempt to take her own life with a razor blade only to have Max show up at her door moments later. As the rest of the story plays out, they talk and form an unusual relationship until Max winds up on the floor and Lydia's mindset starts to shift.
Tears comes with an optional audio commentary with Sykes, who talks about shooting in Virginia Beach in the off season of 1996 to get a specific look and atmosphere, how this was made while he was a student but was not a school project, what went into the pre-production side of things, working with the two actors, shooting over two days and more.
Finishing up the extras on the disc are a still gallery for The Pact and a separate one for Tears, trailers for a few other Saturn’s Core releases (Mail Order Murder, Psycho Sisters and Duck: The Carbine High Massacre), menus and chapter selection options. This release also comes packaged with some reversible cover art featuring newly commissioned artwork by Corinne Halbert.
The Pact - The Final Word:
Saturn’s Core Releasing’s Blu-ray debut for The Pact offers up a previously hard to see but worthwhile SOV feature in decent enough shape and with some nice extras too. The movie is very definitely a product of the mid-nineties, there’s no getting around that, but it’s fairly unique in the pantheon of camcorder horror thanks to an interesting story and some decent performances. All in all, a solid package for an interesting movie.