Countdown This Film Made Me Want to Countdown my Death Grade: F
Source: IMDB
Halloween is tomorrow, a lovely time of year. The leaves change colors, sweater weather is approaching, people dressing up in costumes, and horror fans finally can feel the love. You know what I hate about Halloween?! Hollywood busting out a crappy horror film every year at the end of every October. But this year... This one film that released in the last week of October, may be crowned as the most unbearable horror film for years to come... Here comes COUNTDOWN! From the film maker that brought you Boats... Comes Countdown. Countdown tells a story about a haunted phone app called Countdown. Whomever downloads the app, tells you how many years, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds you have left until you die. A girl named Quinn (Elizabeth Lail) passed her test and she’s officially a nurse, so she decides the best way to celebrate is to download this app. She discovers she only has two days left to live. Quinn will overcome the horrors of this app, with some help from her family, strangers, an app hacker, and a priest. I liked Elizabeth Lail in the Netflix show You, her performance in this film is fine, but I guarantee you once she gets casted in some good material, she’ll drawn attention and soon will have fan accounts on twitter. The film looks presentable, it looks like a real film. But you know with this positive, comes a negative. You see if this film visually looks like a real movie, then there should be no excuse for just about everything else to be extremely awful and lazy. If this film was made by amateurs whom tried their best to make a movie, with limited resources, perhaps a hall pass can be made for how awful this film is. Before going into this film I actually thought the concept itself looked kind of cool. A haunted app that looks similar to Final Destination... Who knows, it could be fun! Unfortunately I felt in complete misery for an hour and a half watching Countdown. The biggest problem with Countdown is the inability to understand, what this film was trying to go for. You see in the beginning, it looked like it was going for a serious approach in making a standard horror film. But then half way through it suddenly wants to become a deep metaphorical film for sexual harassment, then after that it wants to become comedy.... What is going on here?! The biggest question I have for Justin Dec the director/writer of the film, is what were you trying to create with Countdown?! Did you want to make a serious horror film or did you want to make an entertaining goofy horror comedy?! Make up your mind will ya, tone wise it’s a mess. I wasn’t expecting this film to be scary at all, but man did the horror element of this film extremely SUCKED. For the times this film wanted to be a horror film, it falls flat on it’s face, I was sitting comfortably in my seat bored out of my mind. The horror element is the same generic crap I’ve been receiving time and time again with these teenage horror films. There’s an entity with a black cape on, claiming it’s another mythical curse, as we have several moments of jump scares that never lands once. We’ve seen it with The Bye Bye Man, Slender Man, and Truth or Dare, can it please just end this never ending nonsense? I’m tired of watching the same horror movie over and over again, do something different for once that is effective and worth watching. The deep metaphorical part about sexual harassment is well appreciated, however having this included in this film makes no sense whatsoever. It feels forced, out of place, a side plot that is not needed in the slightest, just completely pointless. Then we have the comedy portion of this film and I can not tell you how much I HATED the comedy material of this film. I didn’t laugh at anything, these were poorly written jokes written by a ten year old. The worst part of the comedy material is the goofy stereotype priest character, whom is obsessed with demons... WHY?! Every time on screen it feels like my entire body is deflated, because I have to sit here to hear this stupid character to talk. The story itself feels like a complete rip off from Final Destination, I’m not a fan of that film but at least there was appreciation for that film. With this film this concept is either taken seriously or not seriously, as the tone feels completely confused on what it was trying to do. But to top it all off it’s not entertaining to the slightest, causing the viewer to become bored within minutes. You can see why this film is aimed for teenagers because teenagers go buy tickets for these horror films, as an excuse to go on a date, girls night out, boys night out. But all they really going to do is waste their money on paying for a ticket, paying for over priced snacks, and then for a good half of the film they’ll be on their phones because teenagers don’t have a great attention span to begin with. But it doesn’t matter, as long as you made this film PG-13, teenagers won’t care as long as the genre reads “Horror”. The entire ending to this film... I mean how does that happen?! You got an entity that has the power to avoid someone being killed, but it somehow struggles when a character tries to do that?! First of all that doesn’t work and second off it’s lazy. Even how it concludes doesn’t even make any damn sense. I just want to end my thoughts on this film, talking about the alert ring tones this app makes. It all sounds like horror noise you hear from Halloween decorations... Whatever. You know what Slender Man, The Bye Bye Man, and Truth or Dare have over this film?! Some enjoyment. Every single film I just mentioned is garbage, but you know what at least I remembered laughing at one point, at least I remembered having a good time at one point despite how awful those films were. With this film.... I’m at a funeral with this film, there is no enjoyment, it’s painfully terrible. Overall, Countdown is easily one of the worst films of the year and easily the worst theatrical experience I’ve had all year long. I don’t recommend this film, it’s a waste of time and complete garbage. Countdown let me down man, all I wanted was to laugh at a bad horror film and I can’t even get that... AGHHHHHHHHH! -Mitch Smietana