Everyone in The Covenant, Renny Harlin's heavy-metal-tinged stab at the teenage-witch genre, is very easy on the eyes. That's good, because it means at least two bodily organs are safe. The ears, pummeled at every turn by a soundtrack of annoyingly loud metal and thunderous swooshing noises, don't fare so well. And thanks to a slapdash, extremely predictable plot and a meaningless witchy shorthand (Book Of Damnation? Check. Cool-sounding supernatural terms like "darkling"? Check.), the brain is pretty much ignored throughout.
The Covenant (or High-School Warlock Power Struggle, as it's sure to be called in international release) concerns The Sons Of Ipswich, a quartet of totally awesome bros who are descendants of the original five families that settled a Massachusetts town in the 1600s. The fifth bloodline, we're told at least three times in the first 20 minutes, mysteriously died off long ago. Being a Son Of Ipswich has its advantages: It means you're really attractive, everyone at school totally looks up to you, and you have The Power, which can be used for really wicked things like making an SUV fly or an enemy puke. Together, the four Sons Of Ipswich dominate the school, in the way that only a bunch of all-powerful Abercrombie-model wannabes can. On their 18th birthdays, however, they get to Ascend, at which point The Power is upgraded from the ability to throw kegs at each other to the ability to throw big blobs of force at each other.
But someone else has been using The Power, and not just to flip up a girl's skirt at the local bar. No, someone's been using it for real mischief, like murder, not to mention inducing totally creepy nightmares about spiders. Which one of the Sons Of Ipswich could it be? Is it possible that the fifth bloodline didn't die off a few centuries ago? Also, why is that new guy in school always hanging around the Sons and their girlfriends? Hmm. These are questions that can only be answered by a showdown!
Okay, so it isn't challenging. There are worse things for a horror-thriller about supernatural high-schoolers to not be. Like not scary. Or not thrilling. Or not as entertaining as an episode of Charmed.