Review: “Head Count”

A cast comprised entirely of millenneals summons a monster by reading a creepypasta website… this movie isn’t great, but its better than it has any right to be based on that description.

I wish this movie were scarier. That probably rings true for many of the movies I watch, but in particular, I wasn’t expecting much from this one and it really had me rooting for it by the halfway point. Set in beautiful Joshua Tree National Park, this low-budget horror film features a pretty charming cast of young people who are just trying to have a good time when they accidentally summon some manner of evil spirit intent on wreaking havoc on their vacation. Its not a novel set-up, but I really like the verisimilitude of performances. These are young adults who just want to drink, get high and be promiscuous, but in the way that actual young adults behave, not in the counterfeit way that most protagonists are portrayed in horror films. If this were a coming-of-age drama or raunchy sex comedy, I would be way on board thanks to the script and acting. Unfortunately, as a horror movie, it is missing actual scares commensurate with the effectiveness of its other elements. The build up is perfect, it just never delivers the pay off that it primes you for.

The demon that is conjured up by the lead actor is called Hisji, and as far as I can tell, it is completely a construct of this movie. The script slowly ekes out information about the particular properties and motivations of this terror, but it is largely a generic boogeyman. The one element that works in the film’s favor is making Hisji a shape-shifting doppelganger, and the horror scenes that manage to work make use of this (conveniently low budget) conceit. There is considerable dread sewn just by showing us the same actor in two places at once, letting us know that Hisji is in the house, so to speak. The problems start to arise in the third act, when everything should be getting heightened. Sure, the body count piles up, but the filmmakers don’t have any new tricks in their bag to draw from so it all lands a little flat. At some point Hisji makes an appearance in its original form, but the CGI construction is laughable. It looks like a demo from 1998, not something we should be seeing in a film in 2019. At some point, if you don’t have the resources to produce something better than that, you need to just pull the plug and come up with something else.

Overall, I actually enjoyed Head Count way more than I expected to. It is far from a perfect film, but I was invested in the characters and bought into the suspenseful build up to what was ultimately a lackluster climax. Mixed review, I know, but in the spirit of supporting independent filmmakers, I suggest you give this one a shot. There are plenty worse ways to spend your October evenings.

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