Head Count Quick View Poster is Dope, the Movie However is Lame Grade: D

Source: IMDB

Head Count tells a story about Evan (Isaac Jay) visiting his brother over the weekend. While on a hike, Evan meets an attractive girl named Zoe (Ashleigh Morghan). Zoe invites Evan to tag along, as she’s having a night of partying and drinking planned at a small house with a bunch of friends. Evan agrees to come along as things start to become a weird during the night. Involving an entity named Hisji... This is not a typo. Dealing with the supernatural and suicide ritual curses... Ight den. So what made me want to check out Head Count was the poster, I thought it looked pretty cool. It brings up my curiosity of what these two young lads, in a hot tub are looking at in fear... Very nice. Unfortunately I didn't like Head Count, it reminds of a less interesting and misconstructed version of last year's The Endless. So how this entity is summoned is you have to sing Hisji’s name five times. The film doesn't even follow the rules because it's summoned without it's name being sung, Evan says it's name five times... So how can this demon be summoned, if Evan doesn't sing Hisji’s name five times?! Like have one of the immature kids sing the name five times because they believe it's fake and full of nonsense, that way you're following the rules of how this entity can summoned. I hate to say it: Despite how awful The Bye Bye Man is, at least they had rules set up for how The Bye Bye Man can appear and haunt the kids, as they follow the rules set in place. It's just a simple task that should've been done the right way. I have a problem with how the story goes. Besides lack of interest because it's kind of a dull and not at all scary film, I don't understand the ability this entity has when summoned. The suicide ritual side and the mind control, where a character loses control of themselves I thought was fine, but then you have this entity duplicating all the characters and sometimes transports them to different places... It doesn't quite make sense at all. It's doing way too much, as the audience comes to confusion of what it's all about?! Now I understand this is a low budget horror film, but I can not help to make a comment of how bad the special effects were especially the entity’s appearance. It's just a dark unnatural looking alien and even so I felt it didn't need to be in the film either. I think the characters losing control of themselves, as they're killing themselves is a solid horror element, having this alien character kind of loses the creepiness and also curiosity from the audience, it just comes off super lame. I didn't care for any performances at all, didn't care about any character either. I say some nice shots from a Cinematography stand point and a couple neat ideas here and there, but as an end result I just didn't care for this film much at all as it's a constructed mess. Overall, Head Count was a bad film. Just go ahead and watch The Endless instead, you'll have a better time watching that than this. -Mitch Smietana