The Covenant (2006)
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images, sexual content, partial nudity and language
Score: 1 out of 5 (quality), 3 out of 5 (unintentional comedy)
I went into The Covenant expecting one of the campiest, most homoerotic horror films ever made, something on the order of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge if not a David DeCoteau movie in terms of films that, while not having any explicitly gay male characters, are otherwise dripping with subtext and coding. This movie has quite a reputation in that regard. Rantasmo, a YouTube film critic who discusses LGBT themes in media and popular culture, devoted a video to it, and a trip to FanFiction.net demonstrates that a great part of its continued fandom comes from fanfic writers, a group famous for jumping onto any hint of a relationship between two attractive men and turning it into an 80,000-word romantic epic with often quite explicit sex scenes. Critics at the time absolutely ravaged it; you'd be hard-pressed to find any positive reviews, even from no-name TV stations or small-town newspapers.
And from the moment the film opens with a Rob Zombie remix playing over ancient texts outlining the backstory mixed with scenes of teenagers partying, you know exactly what to expect. This is a bad movie, with terrible acting (especially from actors who have since proven themselves to be better than this), overdone special effects, a nonsensical and paper-thin plot, and repulsive, interchangeable lead characters... and yet, it's one that, in spite of itself, I couldn't help but enjoy. The gay undertones weren't as all-pervasive as I'd been led to believe, but it does deliver on shirtless hunks, towel snapping, and many, many scenes designed to get you to question if the protagonist and the villain have a thing for each other. That's not where this film's real camp value came from, though. No, that came from the alpha dudebro nature of every single male character, all of whom acted like they stepped out of a lab where they spliced the DNA of Brock Turner, Brett Kavanaugh, and the Steubenville High School football team into a cast of ragingly toxic, privileged douchebags who, in an '80s teen comedy, would probably have been the villains. It feels almost like a parody of the Fast and the Furious movies in this regard, albeit one where, unlike the later installments in that series, nobody involved seemed to have gotten the joke. And when you combine it with the aforementioned subtext, the joke becomes that much funnier. The Covenant is a trash classic in the making, a stupendously lunk-headed movie where all of its awful elements coalesce into so much more than the sum of its parts.
The simplest way to describe the plot is that it's a male, East Coast prep version of The Craft, the 1995 horror film about Wiccan goth girls in a Catholic high school, albeit with more of an urban fantasy-tinged backstory. Our four leads, Caleb, Pogue, Tyler, and Reid, are the impossibly handsome elites at Spenser Academy in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the four of them descended from families of witches who set up shop in the New World hundreds of years ago. They've got the power, and they use it to get laid and hold awesome beach parties. And they're still teenagers -- when they turn 18 and reach adulthood, their powers will grow even further, though overuse of such comes at the cost of prematurely aging them, a fate that befell Caleb's father. There was once a fifth family of Ipswich, but they were destroyed when the Salem witch trials spread to Ipswich... or so it was thought. As it turns out, a bastard son continued the bloodline, and its present-day descendant Chase wishes to steal the power of Caleb, who is on the cusp of turning 18, and get revenge against the four witch families who betrayed his own and left him with nobody to help him understand his power.
This film was directed by Renny Harlin, a filmmaker cut from a similar cloth as the late Tony Scott, and as such, the visual style is probably the most interesting thing about it. Oh, it's bad, like everything else in this film, with CGI overkill in both the action scenes and when the film is trying to be scary. But instead of the flat and boring kind of bad, or the headache-inducing, incoherent kind of bad, it's the kind that's best enjoyed with a tub of popcorn in one hand and the other reaching into it to grab a big handful of popcorn to shovel into your mouth. Stylized shots go hand-in-hand with loud metal music, all of it calculated to tell you how to feel as our cast of witch-bros outwits the cops or fights each other by hurling big, gooey, translucent blobs of magical energy. None of the actors gives a convincing performance, but they didn't need to; their only real job here was to look good and pose for the camera, and they do that admirably. The style of this film is in-your-face obnoxious, but it succeeds where other awful teen horror films from this time period failed by going all-in on the style rather than trying to play any of it the least bit straight or sober, distracting me from the awful writing long enough that I was still entertained even when the credits rolled.
And trust me, the writing is pure, unadulterated garbage. I'm not surprised to learn that the writer for this, J. S. Cardone, mainly specialized in direct-to-video action movies and teen horror flicks, including the remakes of Prom Night and The Stepfather, as here one can find the exact same style-over-substance feel as with those films. The token female characters of note, Sarah and Kate, exist strictly as surrogates for the target audience of teenage girls to learn the backstory behind the "sons of Ipswich", as the protagonists are known, with the former also serving as first a shallow love interest for Caleb and then a damsel in distress. Shallow writing is hardly restricted to the girls; Caleb is the only one of the four protagonists who gets any sort of development or inner conflict whatsoever, the other three all being blank, meatheaded shells who blend into each other personality-wise and largely disappear during the climax. The villain Chase is a one-note cackling madman who is obviously evil from the moment we see him, such that it's not even a twist when we learn that he is, in fact, evil. The characters are haunted by apparitions called "darklings" that are never explained, except insofar as they might be connected to Caleb trying to scare them. We get such amazing lines of dialogue as "Harry Potter can kiss my ass!" and "how about I make you my wi-atch?" There's little creativity in the kinds of magic that the witch-bros can perform, the film only showing us hovering, glorified Hadokens, and mundane uses like picking locks and fixing cars. Initially, a conflict is built up between Caleb and his friends over how the latter (Reid especially) are growing addicted to their powers, given that Caleb watched his father destroy himself by doing so, but this is never really fleshed out, and is ignored every time the four boys, Caleb included, use their powers to do things the easy way or get out of trouble. You might think that Chase's abuse of his powers would be used to draw comparisons to Caleb's friends and how they exploit their privilege to get away with anything, perhaps drawing some real-world subtext into the film's central conflict, but the film isn't smart enough to recognize this. The script is a complete and total mess, but again, when paired with the direction, it is a glorious mess that reminded me of a bad soap opera in the best way. Shallow and braindead as it is, the story here is reasonably coherent and never boring, such that, while I have ideas for how this story might have been a bit meatier, I'm afraid they might have actually made the movie worse by reducing the sheer fun I had with it.
And from the moment the film opens with a Rob Zombie remix playing over ancient texts outlining the backstory mixed with scenes of teenagers partying, you know exactly what to expect. This is a bad movie, with terrible acting (especially from actors who have since proven themselves to be better than this), overdone special effects, a nonsensical and paper-thin plot, and repulsive, interchangeable lead characters... and yet, it's one that, in spite of itself, I couldn't help but enjoy. The gay undertones weren't as all-pervasive as I'd been led to believe, but it does deliver on shirtless hunks, towel snapping, and many, many scenes designed to get you to question if the protagonist and the villain have a thing for each other. That's not where this film's real camp value came from, though. No, that came from the alpha dudebro nature of every single male character, all of whom acted like they stepped out of a lab where they spliced the DNA of Brock Turner, Brett Kavanaugh, and the Steubenville High School football team into a cast of ragingly toxic, privileged douchebags who, in an '80s teen comedy, would probably have been the villains. It feels almost like a parody of the Fast and the Furious movies in this regard, albeit one where, unlike the later installments in that series, nobody involved seemed to have gotten the joke. And when you combine it with the aforementioned subtext, the joke becomes that much funnier. The Covenant is a trash classic in the making, a stupendously lunk-headed movie where all of its awful elements coalesce into so much more than the sum of its parts.
The simplest way to describe the plot is that it's a male, East Coast prep version of The Craft, the 1995 horror film about Wiccan goth girls in a Catholic high school, albeit with more of an urban fantasy-tinged backstory. Our four leads, Caleb, Pogue, Tyler, and Reid, are the impossibly handsome elites at Spenser Academy in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the four of them descended from families of witches who set up shop in the New World hundreds of years ago. They've got the power, and they use it to get laid and hold awesome beach parties. And they're still teenagers -- when they turn 18 and reach adulthood, their powers will grow even further, though overuse of such comes at the cost of prematurely aging them, a fate that befell Caleb's father. There was once a fifth family of Ipswich, but they were destroyed when the Salem witch trials spread to Ipswich... or so it was thought. As it turns out, a bastard son continued the bloodline, and its present-day descendant Chase wishes to steal the power of Caleb, who is on the cusp of turning 18, and get revenge against the four witch families who betrayed his own and left him with nobody to help him understand his power.
This film was directed by Renny Harlin, a filmmaker cut from a similar cloth as the late Tony Scott, and as such, the visual style is probably the most interesting thing about it. Oh, it's bad, like everything else in this film, with CGI overkill in both the action scenes and when the film is trying to be scary. But instead of the flat and boring kind of bad, or the headache-inducing, incoherent kind of bad, it's the kind that's best enjoyed with a tub of popcorn in one hand and the other reaching into it to grab a big handful of popcorn to shovel into your mouth. Stylized shots go hand-in-hand with loud metal music, all of it calculated to tell you how to feel as our cast of witch-bros outwits the cops or fights each other by hurling big, gooey, translucent blobs of magical energy. None of the actors gives a convincing performance, but they didn't need to; their only real job here was to look good and pose for the camera, and they do that admirably. The style of this film is in-your-face obnoxious, but it succeeds where other awful teen horror films from this time period failed by going all-in on the style rather than trying to play any of it the least bit straight or sober, distracting me from the awful writing long enough that I was still entertained even when the credits rolled.
And trust me, the writing is pure, unadulterated garbage. I'm not surprised to learn that the writer for this, J. S. Cardone, mainly specialized in direct-to-video action movies and teen horror flicks, including the remakes of Prom Night and The Stepfather, as here one can find the exact same style-over-substance feel as with those films. The token female characters of note, Sarah and Kate, exist strictly as surrogates for the target audience of teenage girls to learn the backstory behind the "sons of Ipswich", as the protagonists are known, with the former also serving as first a shallow love interest for Caleb and then a damsel in distress. Shallow writing is hardly restricted to the girls; Caleb is the only one of the four protagonists who gets any sort of development or inner conflict whatsoever, the other three all being blank, meatheaded shells who blend into each other personality-wise and largely disappear during the climax. The villain Chase is a one-note cackling madman who is obviously evil from the moment we see him, such that it's not even a twist when we learn that he is, in fact, evil. The characters are haunted by apparitions called "darklings" that are never explained, except insofar as they might be connected to Caleb trying to scare them. We get such amazing lines of dialogue as "Harry Potter can kiss my ass!" and "how about I make you my wi-atch?" There's little creativity in the kinds of magic that the witch-bros can perform, the film only showing us hovering, glorified Hadokens, and mundane uses like picking locks and fixing cars. Initially, a conflict is built up between Caleb and his friends over how the latter (Reid especially) are growing addicted to their powers, given that Caleb watched his father destroy himself by doing so, but this is never really fleshed out, and is ignored every time the four boys, Caleb included, use their powers to do things the easy way or get out of trouble. You might think that Chase's abuse of his powers would be used to draw comparisons to Caleb's friends and how they exploit their privilege to get away with anything, perhaps drawing some real-world subtext into the film's central conflict, but the film isn't smart enough to recognize this. The script is a complete and total mess, but again, when paired with the direction, it is a glorious mess that reminded me of a bad soap opera in the best way. Shallow and braindead as it is, the story here is reasonably coherent and never boring, such that, while I have ideas for how this story might have been a bit meatier, I'm afraid they might have actually made the movie worse by reducing the sheer fun I had with it.
The Bottom Line
The Covenant is a film that nails the sweet spot of "so bad it's good". Do not, under any circumstances, go into this expecting quality. Do, however, bring your best buds and your best drugs as you laugh your ass off at a movie that Steven Strait, Sebastian Stan, and Taylor Kitsch are all probably really ashamed of now.
No comments:
Post a Comment