The Covenant

I actually bought the DVD, I had that much faith in my enjoyment of the film. And it was AWESOME, in that whole this-teen-movie-is-really-shit kind of way.

The Story: Back in the Salem days, there were 5 Warlock families who were in a coven, but one of them died out. The other 4 have passed on their power from generation to generation. The power is dangerous because it's addictive and makes your body old and gross. You get a sample of it at 13 and then at 18 you get the whole thing.

Anyhoo, present day: 4 handsome handsome men have inherited the power. The oldest is Caleb (aka Stephen Strait aka that boy we were looking at in Sky High and 10000 BC), who falls in love with new girl Sarah (aka Laura Ramsey aka Olivia from She's the Man). His other brothers are Pogue (aka handsome long haired man), Tyler (aka Chase Crawford aka Nate from Gossip Girl) and Reid (aka wishes he was Draco Malfoy). Weird things start happening, starting with the mysterious and probably magic-related death of some student, and Caleb getting signs that power is being used in extreme quantities, even though his buds say it isn't them. He has to sort it out while also dealing with his budding new romance.

I won't go on because I don't want to ruin it and also because I am lazy. If I tell you any more it gets ridiculously predictable.

The Good: The gratuitous shirtless guy scenes... (I know you love me for finding you that picture... for more shirtless men, see here... OH GOD, see the side profile of this blogger -- ANOTHER SINGAPOREAN!) Conveniently, they do swimming in PE all the time.... 17 year old boys should not have bodies like that. The men were very very sexy. There are also equally gratuitous girls in skimpy pjs scenes, because obvi that's where you find out all the juicy deets. Also good were the fancy cars/sexy motorbikes. Seriously, these 4 boys are the perfect boyfriends. There were some pretty great shots like when Handsome Man is meant to crash into a lorry and his car shatters and breaks up into all its pieces which are suspended in mid-air til the lorry goes through and then it reassembles. It was in the preview, I remember that.

The Bad: Like I said before, the story was pretty predictable. And by pretty, I mean, I could have stopped watching it after the first half and known how it would turn out. The acting, with particular attention to Sarah and also the new guy. The sound was also quite bad, the dubbing was pretty obvious and stood out too much from the background sounds. I think it might have been a little out of sync too. And you know what they say, bad dubbing = bad film. Also bad was that there were no sex scenes and very little relationship developments.

The Ugly: The way movies look on my shitty tv. It has a way of wasting the thousands that film companies spend on making the fore and background blend, and also ruins the lighting. As such, I am unsure as to whether the special effects were actually looking that shitty or whether it was just my tv messing around.

The Rest: The dialogue was not awful, which was a pleasant surprise... nothing too cheesy went down.

I think this is kind of a foreboding as to the kind of movie Twilight is going to be, although hopefully that will be better because it will have more soul mate scenes. It had some very Twilight aspects, such as how everyone's eyes went black while doing magic and also because they drove very nice vehicles very quickly.

Yay or nay? Um, yay for girls who want to look at hot men, and I guess anyone looking for a vacuous movie on a night in with mixed audiences. Could be a good dvd-date movie, except that your date will find you sadly lacking at the end of the film.