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Revolves around four friends at a prestigious university whose promising futures are jeopardized when they become connected to the accidental death of a classmate. When another student says she knows about their involvement, the friends panic and start to plot her murder.

Renee Olstead, Alexa PenaVega, Michael J. Willett, and Beau Mirchoff in The Murder Pact (2015)

The preppies are at it again. In reality, the death of the fellow student was accidental, pictures taken or not. The film definitely had promise with the 4 remaining students becoming a pact in that they would not expose anything. The film went awry at the end. Our picture taker was certainly not everything that she pretended to be. It is also difficult to fathom the idea that the girl would take such revenge on her boyfriend for the Broadway interview that she had. The boyfriend, with his contacts, appears to look like some monster. The film had promise as it depicted the mistrust the friends begin to have with each other. If only it had ended better.

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The Murder Pact

Supposed to be based on an Edgar Allan Poe&#39;s short story. I couldn&#39;t find the connection. It seems to be the young brats throwing tantrums and histrionics. A perfect score? It is enough to make me laugh.

This Lifetime thriller seems a bit deja vu at first - a bit &#39;I Know What You Did Last Summer&#39; thing. But there is a clever conclusion twist that makes sense and saves the story. Some college kids get blackmailed after one of their friends falls off a balcony so they decide to get rid of the blackmailer. But then you can guess - things aren&#39;t over for them yet. The production is a bit more glossy than typical Lifetime. The cast is quite good too. Beau Mirchoff is suited to the rich player. Alexa Vega looks prettier here than in the &#39;Tomorrow People&#39;. Renee Olstead of &#39;Secret Life&#39; isn&#39;t quite slim enough to play a ballerina. Since the ending is clever, it&#39;s worth watching.

&quot;The Murder Pact&quot; an unusually well done thriller which begins with a nice-looking but chunky young woman named Camille (Alexa PenaVega — that odd spelling of her last name, with the two words jammed together but with a capital letter in the middle as if she were a computer program, is what both the official credits and IMDb.com gave us) belting out a power-rock ballad as an audition piece for some bored Broadway producers who are really looking for an established star to play the lead in their next show and only agreed to see her as a favor to her 1-percenter boyfriend Will LaSalle (Beau Mirchoff). Will seems to have it all — money, social position and good looks — and he never lets anyone forget it; he&#39;s officially engaged to Camille but that doesn&#39;t stop him from bedding any young woman who&#39;ll hold still for him. What&#39;s more, he&#39;s got his bedroom bugged so he can photograph his sexual encounters and relive the experiences any time he wants by playing them on his laptop. The principals are Camilla, Will, Will&#39;s less secure friend Rick (Michael J. Willett, who incidentally has his hair dyed blonde on his IMDb.com head shot though he&#39;s dark-haired in this movie) and Annabel (Renée Olstead), a hanger-on and (of course) occasional trick of Will&#39;s who&#39;s also an aspiring dancer and is super-concerned about her weight. All of them are students at Camden College, a New England university whose most prominent architectural feature is a spectacularly ugly round building that looks like Frank Gehry re-imagined the Capitol Tower. Will has living parents but they almost never see him — a picture of his dad hangs over his mantel as if it&#39;s keeping an eye on him, but we never see his mom at all and his dad (John Heard) only makes a brief surprise appearance towards the end to warn Will that he can do everything he likes as long as he doesn&#39;t besmirch the LaSalle family name. If he does, dad solemnly warns Will, he&#39;ll be disinherited at once. That happens in the middle of an event that has completely discombobulated Will&#39;s carefully constructed life: Heidi (Madeleine Dauer), yet another young co-ed Will has got drunk, drugged and put the make on, takes a tumble off the railing on one of the Camden dorm balconies and falls to her death. It appears to be an accident — director Colin Theys, working from a script by John Doolan, makes it look even to us as if that particular section of the railing was just loose and gave way under Heidi&#39;s weight — but while the altercation on the balcony was going on a student photographer named Lisa (Sara Kapner) happened by and took photos of the whole thing. Lisa contacts Will and his friends and threatens to blackmail them, demanding $4 million for the photos or she&#39;ll take them to the police and Will will get popped for Heidi&#39;s murder. The four principals meet to discuss how they&#39;re going to handle the situation and collectively decide that as members of the financial and social elite they have way too much to live for to let a nobody from &quot;the other side of the tracks&quot; as Lisa get in the way and threaten their futures. So, at Will&#39;s instigation, they decide they&#39;re simply going to kill her. The film, which Doolan proclaims is an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe&#39;s &quot;The Tell-Tale Heart&quot; (it isn&#39;t, but there are similarities not only to that one but at least two other Poe stories, &quot;The Cask of Amontillado&quot; and &quot;The Premature Burial&quot;), is a genuinely suspenseful thriller with a legitimate and believable surprise ending. Though some of it seems a bit arbitrary — the climax takes place at a masquerade ball Will is throwing (a family tradition he insists on carrying on even though his folks, who usually host it, are out of town) that seems more to reflect a desire on the part of writer Doolan and director Theys to do a knockoff of &quot;Eyes Wide Shut&quot; (also a story of decadence among the 1 percent!) than anything else — and the moral about spoiled rich kids thinking they can do literally anything they like because their (or their parents&#39;) money will always be there to buy them out of it is done well here but was done even better in the previous Lifetime movie &quot;Restless Virgins&quot; — for the most part this is an amazing film, and it&#39;s especially nice to watch a Lifetime movie in which the two male protagonists are definitely exciting, hot young men (Beau Mirchoff as Will even has something of a James Dean quality, though Dean never played a character who was born to this much money), even though inevitably, given Lifetime&#39;s well-established iconography, hot young man = black-hearted villain!

Loosely based on Edgar Allen Poe&#39;s famous short story &quot;The Tell-Tale Heart,&quot; &quot;The Murder Pact&quot; tells the story of four bratty college students who form a secret compact to withhold details from the police about the death of a fellow student named Heidi, who toppled over a terrace to her death. The ringleader of the brats is Will LaSalle, the son of a business tycoon, who hopes to head up the family corporation after the death of his father. Will wants to avoid revealing to the public that Heidi was pregnant with his child at the time he was standing next to her and possibly nudged her over the terrace railing. Will enlists his friends in the compact and masterminds the death of Lisa, a fellow student, who had photographed them at the scene of Heidi&#39;s death. Roderick is the rower on the crew team who is among the most spineless of the conspirators. He cracks under the pressure of keeping the secret. His girlfriend Annabel (Bels) also begins to cave in due to a case of the guilts. Bels is a dancer who lost 65 pounds and had a tummy tuck. But she lacks the fortitude to keep a secret, especially when a zealous police detective begins to ask questions. The conspirator closest in temperament to Will is her girlfriend Camille (Cam). An aspiring actress, Cam uses her influence from Will&#39;s family to get her an audition for a Broadway play. The film is cleverly framed by two auditions of Cam with the same New York producer. Things come to a head in a lavish masquerade ball thrown by Will. The film is worth watching for the final ten minutes, as the filmmakers pull out all the stops for a surprise ending. A personal physical trait of Will was his enormous, misshaped blue left eyeball. He is extremely sensitive about this condition and constantly inserts contacts to counteract being &quot;a side show.&quot; But, by the end of the film, that big, blue eyeball is on full display as Will experiences a reversal of roles for the first time in his life in an ending worthy of Edgar Allen Poe.

Even though the plot line has quite a few holes in it, they are easy to overlook. As this story progresses the four main characters get themselves into ever more deeper trouble by trying to disassociate themselves from an unfortunate incident. Rather than telling the truth about what they witnessed. The setting is a very snooty high end college that caters to the children of very snooty rich high end people. Very snooty high end Will LaSalle, his fiancé Camille and their friends Rick and Annabel torment insecure student Heidi and in a drunken state Heidi falls from the highest point on a building in which a party is being held. Lisa, also a student, who just happens to be there with her camera, photographs the four main characters looking over the edge of the building at the now dead Heidi on the pavement below. Lisa sees this as an excellent opportunity to get some much needed cash from the four very snooty rich high end students. But, the four very snooty rich high end Will, Camille, Rick, and Annabel will do anything to keep their very snooty rich high end names out of the scandal press. So they make a plan! I actually enjoyed this story because it&#39;s nicely written, acted, directed, and the production is on a scale that added a level of reality to the story. Unfortunately there are a few holes in the plot that are too obvious to miss but the plot has attention getting twists and turns as you watch these very snooty rich high end kids achieve exactly that which they wanted to avoid.

Great movie, great cast. Nice to see movies made here in New England. I have never been a fan of movies with murder but, this was a real mind opener with a mystery to solve. I still cant tell if it was scary or a thriller that had me intrigued to learn what had happened.

User reviews

The Murder Pact

**1/2

A Bratty Teenage Flick

Things come together

Unusually good for Lifetime

Beware of the Cyclopian Eye

Good

Great cast

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