Zombies Ruin Everything

In dishonor of Hollywood’s recent attempts at shoving Taylor Kitsch (John Carter, Battleship) in our face, I’m going to heckle The Covenant. I have hated this movie ever since I saw it in theaters in the summer of ’06. I remember it well because I was actually paying for movies then which made it a complete waste of my time and money.

This piece of crap is about a group of four male witches. Yes, male witches. They’re not referred to as warlocks in the movie or even wizards, like Harry Potter has the decency to do, but witches. They’re kind of like the Twilight vampires…except they’re witches. They go to a prep school where they’re allowed to go anywhere and do anything at anytime they please because they’re so beautiful. Their names are as follows: Caleb, Reid, Tyler and Pogue. POGUE, I said.

“Hey, bros. Wanna chill today? We could pose unnaturally for a while.” -Total Hottie #3

They all have witch powers and can use them whenever they want but at a price- if they use their powers too much…they will die. I want you to imagine some of the richest people in the world knowing that this was the premise of the movie, and then giving millions of dollars to make it happen onscreen. Getting back to this magical tale, when the 24 year old high school kids use their powers too much, they DIE.

This doesn’t stop them from using their vague, unexplained abilities to blow women’s skirts up and throw giant, white, elastic-looking energy balls at each other that look like they’re supposed to hurt upon impact. I couldn’t find any clips of it because I’m pretty sure everyone involved would like to pretend this movie didn’t exist.

If ‘Alien’ is a metaphor for rape then this is coming out of the closet.

A new kid is introduced at Big Boy School and little by little, the main character, Caleb, starts to suspect him of being the cause of the weird things going on. Caleb has been having visions of people dying and the girl he likes is being haunted. It’s later explained that the new kid is the cause, because he wants the witch boys’ powers. And he needs that power before Caleb turns 18 and his powers fully mature.

Does any of this sound really gay to you? I don’t mean “gay” as another word for “stupid,” I just mean gay. A good twenty minutes of movie time is devoted to all the boys at swim practice which seems to be the only class they take.

They seem pretty comfortable just hanging out in nothing but tiny speedos that would be hard to fit a Capuchin monkey into, much less a 160lb manwitch. What do they do when they’re not in their speedos? Just chillin’ in the locker room together, naked. You know- guy stuff.

Only guy stuff. No girls allowed.

Watch this scene and see if you can explain yourself if someone walks in on you. You won’t be able to do it.

Just kidding, there are a couple girls. Two, to be exact. They all get together and hang out at a local bar. Since they’re 17 and can’t legally drink yet, I assume they’re ordering something a little softer. Like milk. Possibly warm, to make it easier to sleep when they go to bed. No adults are around either because that takes away from the illusion that these kids are just that- kids- and can’t really do too much on their own.

What’s funny is that even though this movie is amazingly awful and made nearly twice it’s budget, it didn’t get multiple sequels like Twilight did. That seems to be the thing nowadays. A movie is bad but still has potential, so studios make a sequel anyway with the promise they’ll do better next time. Green Lantern had to inch its way to make its budget, but before it even did that, a sequel was reported in the works.

So come on, Hollywood, whatever happened to equality, huh? If you’re going to be handing out sequels to really bad movies, I want equality of the sexes! You’ve got the atrocious supernatural movies for the girls, now we want to see atrocious supernatural movies for the gay guys. I’m just kidding, please don’t.

We’ve got all we can handle here.

The opening scene alone is pretty bad. Three guys looking off the edge of a cliff into a CG background. A fourth guy joins the other characters and says “How’s the party?” as they look a thousand feet down through thick fog to a bonfire below. If I was hanging around on the edge of a thousand foot cliff looking down below, and my friend walks up and asks me how everything at the bottom of the cliff was going, I’d probably get the urge to push him off. I’m a thousand feet up on this cliff, man. How would I know?

Then they all turn into CGI figurines that make Woody from Toy Story look realistic as they jump down to the happenin’ get-together.

I don’t usually go by Rotten Tomatoes, which goes by a percentage to tell you how “fresh” a movie is and goes to 100, if you couldn’t guess. What does The Covenant have, you ask? A three. Yes, that’s right, a 3% out of 100, which makes me laugh as I type that. A critic also noted the movie for having laughable dialogue. I understand why they would think that lines like “How about I make you my wee-otch?” before a fight happens is funny, but I wasn’t laughing.

At that point I had my face in my hands, shaking my head. A friend really liked it and I was pretty sure she was messing with me up until she bought it on DVD, at which point I disowned her as a friend.

But she didn’t need me. She just kept the movie on a loop.

What might have been the weirdest part about the movie is that every twenty minutes in the movie, we’re treated to one of Caleb’s bad dreams. This involves him waking up in bed with a gasp right into the camera. You know the kind I’m talking about. Anakin freaking Skywalker does it in Episode III. The weirdness is that it happens like four times throughout the movie and every time the director seems more intent on showing off the characters’ pristine, glistening body, just covered in sweat. MMM.

Not only that, the Taylor Kitsch and the guy who plays Caleb, Steven Strait call each other, both shimmering in their own sweat, just to talk. Like bros do.

Remember that guy’s facial expression as he bites down on the curb right before Edward Norton stomps on his head in American History X(1998)? That was my dignity, watching all these guys pretend to be witches and threaten each other in the locker room, naked. The movie was the boot.

This entry was posted on 05/21/2012 at 12:10 am and is filed under This Movie SUUUCKS with tags bad movie, taylor kitsch, the covenant, this movie suuucks, zombies ruin everything. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.