It's difficult for me to rate The Pact II. I don't think it does anything horribly and it maintains the low-key, left-from-center tilt of the first film, but it doesn't really add anything besides more back-story and a new central character. It isn't particularly frightening, with none of the stand-out scares or nightmare sequences of the original, but it isn't painful to watch and the acting is serviceable.
The Pact II is a film where you can't really give much of a synopsis without ruining the plot. Who everyone is, where Annie (the lead from the original, played by Arrow's Caity Lotz) figures into the events, what the intention of the film is... It can be said that June Abbott (Camilla Luddington, the new Lara Croft, doing a pretty killer American accent), is a crime-scene cleaner who becomes involved in a series of murders linked to the original film when an FBI Agent, Ballard, begins to push in on her life, suggesting she has a connection with the investigation beyond scraping blood off the walls. Ballard, by the way, is portrayed by the always quirky Patrick Fischler, whom I most fondly remember from an enormously weird diner sequence in David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive'. He was intense and bizarre in that, and he's been intense and bizarre pretty much ever since. He is, for me, the shining point of The Pact II, as giving him a larger role than I normally see him get proves to be the best part of the film.
June also has a mother (Amy Pietz) and a cop boyfriend (Scott Michael Foster) who think she works too much, and they both figure prominently in the story. As June becomes more involved with the investigation and the case becomes more personal, the film begins to lose touch with reality, much as the original did. Bad dreams, visions of the dead, phantoms yanking characters into and out of rooms and lost hours invade the story and are probably meant to scare, but for the most part we're just wondering when Annie's going to show up and where exactly the film is heading. When Annie does arrive, pulling bits of the first film with her, it is sadly not the breath of fresh air the movie needed to liven things up. It just keeps limping towards a conclusion, occasionally waving its hands and shouting 'boo', trying to ape the original's panache.
The film does conclude, kind of. The climax eschews any sense of dread or otherworldly malice in favor of stabbings, beatings and revelations, à la Scream, only (thankfully) without the self-referential winks and the nods. Apparently, someone saw the first film and saw franchise potential, because the ending comes with a promise of more. "It's starting again," a character says. More what, though? And what's starting again, exactly? Murders? Floating bodies? Bad dreams? The questions that were answered in the film pretty much sealed the deal on the original's back-story, so we're left scratching our heads as to what the hell they're talking about.
Patrick Fischler is awesome, and I'm more than happy to watch Caity Lotz and Camilla Luddington duke it out with the otherworldly, but The Pact II does little more than coast on the high praise of the original, and its suggestion that it's not quite done yet feels more like a threat to entertainment than to comely young twenty-somethings.
4/10 - It's below average, but it's not offensively bad
