Countdown, 2019.
Directed by Justin Dec
Starring Elizabeth Lail, Jordan Calloway, Talitha Eliana Bateman, Peter Facinelli, Dillon Lane, Tichina Arnold, Annie Winters, P.J. Byrne, Valente Rodriguez, and Matt Letscher.
SYNOPSIS:
When a nurse (Elizabeth Lail) downloads a buzzy app that’s meant to predict your exact time of death, it warns her that she only has three days to live. So when people around her start being picked off one-by-one, she enters a race-against-time to figure out how to stop it.
Attempting to jump on the successful Blumhouse bandwagon of lucrative horror films which embellish a seemingly gimmicky idea with enough smarts and character to make it a genuinely good movie – see Happy Death Day, Upgrade, The Purge – Countdown takes a smartphone sub-genre that features the likes of One Last Call and Unfriended, and evolves the premise to centre on a killer-app. Yup. And you thought those birds were angry.
Everything, and I mean everything about this film is seen-it-all-before. Yes, it’s hard to be completely original in a genre that has always been cyclical, constantly shifting in slasher, found-footage, torture-porn phases, but this feels like horror-movie bingo written by someone who has watched Happy Death Day a few too many times (which would be more fun).
It’s set in a hospital, there’s a creepy older guy, the protagonists mother is dead, she has a strained relationship with her father, and a handset is integral to the plot. BINGO!
Flippancy aside, Countdown does at least try and work in some on-point social-commentary. Underlining the importance of terms & conditions at a time when Mark Zuckerberg is twitching his way through numerous inquisitions will bring a smile to your face, but also ensure you double check the small-print next time you visit an app store. And there’s the #metoo sub-plot, which features Peter Facinelli (Glee, Twilight) as a handsy sleaze-bag doctor, which is probably more involving than the mid-season Buffy the Vampire Slayer monster-of-the-week narrative which drives the rest of the film.
Admittedly, for the Friday night horror-crowd there are enough scares: the Scream evoking pre-credit sequence ends in an impressively shocking fashion, while there’s a requisite toilet stall set-piece that’s predictably unsettling. However, top marks go to an icky sequence in which our cursed nurse has to infiltrate a morgue, one which’ll have you giggling and gagging in equal measure. Such moments are few-and-far between though, with the remainder of the film reduced to loud-noise jumps scares or those of the dropped glass variety, which are so frequent that their effect quickly diminishes.
Little more than Final Destination with a new fascia, Countdown is a times-up thriller that’s more Scooby-Doo than Scream. It might have thrived on the VHS rental store shelves of the 90s, but in this modern world it’s a quick uninstall.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★
Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter @mainstreammatt
