Countdown (2019) - Movie Review

Well, someone must’ve overheard me when I was complaining about how outdated Sextuplets was, because this horror film falls into the same category. However, this isn’t a matter of questioning whether the idea behind it was ever good, but rather questioning whether the idea is good now. Speaking personally (as if I ever do any different around here, but regardless), I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone use the phrase "there’s an app for that" unironically or outside of a game of Cards Against Humanity. Or, at the very least, it's been many years since that last happened. I can’t find any hard data to prove that this is a script that has been kicking around for a long time, but looking at the end result, I would not be surprised because this is some serious reheated leftovers.

For a start, this film’s approach to horror is so out-of-step with itself, it can get really damn painful. It tries to do scares with something spooky just out of the corner of the audience’s eye, but the timing is so awkward and it ends up getting stretched for so long that it loses any efficacy. Other than that, it’s jump scares galore, and particularly tame ones even considering its rating. It kept reminding me of the fart gags from The Master Of Disguise because the timing is just that wonky, and the end result is that off-putting.

For another, the acting sucks. Badly. Elizabeth Lail as the lead Quinn is clearly trying to work with the material she’s given, and she admittedly delivers on some catharsis, but she is the only one here with a clear idea what she’s doing. Jordan Calloway serves mainly as the latest iteration of one of the oldest clichés in horror, and painfully telegraphed at that, Talitha Bateman as Quinn’s sister just treads tacky sibling rivalry in every scene she’s in, Peter Facinelli remains stuck in his typecasting as the resident creepy doctor with a dark side (I guess not everyone managed to move past the Twilight series), and P.J. Byrne as the priest…

Okay, that last one is actually pretty fun. He basically geeks out over the chance to talk about demons and curses, describing the Bible as “the ultimate graphic novel”, and he’s the only one here who seems to be enjoying their time on-set; everyone else looks bloody miserable. Something about his glee in talking about old witches and legends warms the part of me that adores Vertigo comics, and even if the writing around him is lame, the scenes with him in it are at least a little entertaining.

Oh yeah, the writing… what the hell was Justin Dec thinking? Ignoring the dated tagline, the attempts at commentary on how much time people spend on their phones is well beyond passé; everyone has made these quips before, and it makes him look like someone who just discovered what the App Store is. How the app itself got a 3.6 rating on the store is beyond me. Building on that dung heap of a foundation, the lore around the app and its resident spook (who is not only generic as all hell, but you can barely even see when it does show up) is so plain that it’s far too easy to figure out what’s going on, why, and how the demon is gonna be defeated. It could’ve made for some interesting notions about cheating death in regards to doctors, who regularly bring people back from flatlining, but nope; this film is far more interested in rape shenanigans with Dr. Creepy.

Yes, for reasons that barely have anything to do with the actual plot, there’s a running subplot about Quinn and the creepy doctor, where the doctor comes onto her, Quinn pushes him away, and then he tells the hospital board that it was her that pressured him. Wow. An idea so fresh, I can smell the flesh rot from here. This eventually leads to the catharsis I mentioned earlier, but it’s catharsis so goddamn cheap, it’s like Justin Dec digested Unsane and then shat it onto his word processor to write these scenes. It tries for the same gaslighting chills, but because the dialogue is so tacky and the plot developments are so see-through, it just makes for a sensation that breaks the sheer monotony of everything else around it.

And yet, because of all this, there is the slightest chance that this could make for some nice ‘bad movie night’ material. I definitely felt a little nostalgia buzz from when I’d wile away my free time watching reviews of shitty horror movies like this on YouTube; I wouldn’t be surprised if Phelous did a video about this film at some point. It really does come across like a 2000’s-era teen horror flick somehow dodged its own countdown and made it to cinemas today.

But other than ironic entertainment value, some decent work from cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, and P.J. Byrne being fun, this is pretty ghastly. Right up to the requisite sequel baiting which might be the lamest of any film I’ve covered on here. If you have the wherewithal to watch a bad movie just to laugh at it, this might be worth a shot if it ends up on Netflix or the like, but otherwise, you really aren’t missing much.