Countdown Begins October 25
STX Entertainment will be releasing their horror flick “Countdown” to theaters the week before Halloween. The trailer was published online today.
Imagine there’s a phone app that predicts — SOMEHOW — how long you have left to live. Supposing it actually worked, who would download it? Nobody, really — who would seriously WANT to know when they would die? It makes the instant success of the app at the center of “Countdown” feel rather ludicrous, as people beam smiles while holding their screens to the camera and cheerily announcing “I got 63 years!!” Well yay, buddy, but now you have to live with that knowledge for the rest of your life!
Of course, when our main character (played by Elizabeth Lail) downloads the app herself, it gives her a little over two days. The horror! She tries to get rid of the countdown, but the app refuses to delete itself. Maybe she’ll just switch out her phone for a new one….yeah, that’ll work. But no….when she boots up the screen she discovers the app FOLLOWED HER! AAAIIIEEEEEE!
The trailer does show what happens to a person whose clock runs out. She’s in the bathroom and it doesn’t seem like anything’s really going to get her….until some invisible force yanks her into the ceiling accompanied by a jump-scare stinger. It appears the app’s predictions are less a telling of a predestined fate and more like the ghosts who made it simply kill you at that time….which is kind of cheating, but it means the app can’t be pulled by Apple for fraud.
Countdown also stars Jordan Calloway, Talitha Bateman, Tichina Arnold, P.J. Byrne, and Peter Facinelli, and was written and directed by Justin Dec. We admire Dec’s restraint in not naming his script “Killer App.”* The movie opens in theaters October 25.
*But we will knock the marketing department severe demerits for the tagline “Death? There’s an app for that!”