My quick rating - 4.1/10. Death Count is one of those movies that’s been quietly loitering on my watchlist like a sketchy guy outside a convenience store, and curiosity finally won. The premise is simple, cruel, and very online. Strangers wake up in individual cells, collars locked around their necks, and if they don’t earn enough internet “likes,” they die horribly. Because of course they do. Nothing says modern horror quite like social media deciding whether you live or get turned into abstract art. And for being strangers as the description tells us, they seemed to know each other real quickly.
We kick off with Sarah French waking up in her cell, confused, restrained, and immediately having a worse morning than anyone who’s ever overslept for work. She quickly realizes she’s not alone, and soon the rules of the game are laid out by the warden, played by Costas Mandylor, who once again proves he has a permanent reservation in “authoritative creep” roles. One of the rules is promptly ignored by Robert LaSardo, because someone always has to test the system. This earns him a swift, painful lesson in compliance and a headache you definitely can’t fix with aspirin.
From there, the movie leans hard into its Saw-lite DNA. Non-compliance results in nasty ejections from the game, and yes, the gore factor is alive and well. The traps and challenges revolve around self-mutilation, disfigurement, and generally doing things to your own body that would make even a tattoo artist back away slowly. Every time that obnoxious siren blares, it’s time for another round of unplanned “body modification,” all while a live audience watches, votes, and pretends this is somehow entertainment.
Once the stream hits the internet, the police get involved, with Michael Madsen showing up as Detective Casey, looking like he wandered in from a completely different movie but decided to stay anyway. The participants must escalate their grotesque performances to earn votes, because subtlety does not win likes. I did briefly wonder why one character didn’t just exploit the internet’s oldest weakness sooner - let’s be honest, boobs will always get votes. Spoiler: the movie eventually agrees with me, just far later than expected.
Between rounds of bodily harm, the film drops in the motivation behind the whole ordeal. Revenge. The backstory is revealed piece by piece, and while the reason for staging this elaborate murder-livestream feels wildly disproportionate to the original offense, that’s pretty much how these movies operate. Everything takes place inside an abandoned warehouse, which keeps the budget low and the scenery nonexistent, though some fake news clips and post-event interviews try to sell the realism and underline the internet’s moral rot.
The ending leans into sequel-bait territory and gets a bit hokey, but by that point, you know exactly what kind of ride you signed up for. Death Count isn’t here for deep character work or a compelling moral thesis. It’s here for brutality, gimmicks, and social media satire with a blunt object. If you’re into Saw-like carnage and don’t need a strong motive to enjoy the bloodshed, this one will scratch that itch. If not, you might want to log out.
I saw the Mahal Empire logo at the beginning and realized I had missed hearing from my buddy Sonny Mahal, so I emailed Sonny around Halloween. On a sad note, he informed me his brother, Michael, who also produced this film, passed away several months back. RIP Mr. Mahal.
https://jackmeat.com/death-count-2022/
No comments:
Post a Comment