Movie Review - Countdown (2019)
Director: Justin Dec
Starring: Elizabeth Lail, Jordan Calloway, Talitha Eliana Bateman, Peter Facinelli and Tom Segura.
If you’ve seen a horror film rated M/PG-13 then you have unintentionally seen Countdown as this film is the most unoriginal horror film I’ve seen in years. The film follows Quinn (Lail) who downloads an app that tells her when she’s going to die and because it says 2 days (or whatever number it was I don’t remember), she must stop it. When I say unoriginal, I literally mean the film is beat by beat the same as every stock-standard horror film. Girl find some haunted item, tries to understand it but fails, attempts to destroy it but fails, finds a guy who is connected somehow to it, they both experience past traumas due to the demon taunting them, they team up and find a priest who explains the back story of said demon, they attempt a ritual and fail and then the final battle occurs. Sorry for spoilers but I warned you, you have seen this movie. The dialogue was horrendous. It’s not even unintentionally funny, it’s just awful unfunny lines mixed with over the top reactions and exposition after exposition. There were also too many side stories that had no resolutions and the one with Quinn was laughably bad in its execution even though she was dealing with a serious topic.
Elizabeth Lali was ok and did her best with the material. She’s a talented actress and saved this movie. Tom Segura as some tech guy was genuinely hilarious. He had said some dumb movie references but overall was a funny character for the 10 mins of screen time he had. Everyone else was mediocre to bad. Not surprisingly, the horror was terrible. No clever shots, distorting images or use of sound did anything to aid the scares, they only made the jump scares unbearable. Once the demon is seen, I did burst out laughing because it looked like a cheap costume from the dollar store. Was there any production design here or was everything thrown together to make a quick profit? I’ll let you decide... Overall, I don’t even recommend this movie for a comedy. Lail and Segura slightly saved this film from being a complete disaster.
Rating: 2/10