Editorials
‘Countdown’ – 2012 Thai Thriller Is a Darkly Fun Way to Ring in the New Year
While New Year’s is just the first day of January for most people, others consider it to be something more momentous. It represents a fresh start, especially for those who desperately need a change in their lives. The three core characters in Nattawut Poonpiriya’s 2012 movie Countdown don’t know it yet, but their New Year’s Eve is going to be a time of reflection and, most importantly, survival.
The college-age characters in Countdown have a problem that only people their age would consider a real crisis; their weed dealer has retired as part of his own clean slate. But if they want to have a fun New Year’s Eve, then roommates Bee, Jack and Pam (Jarinporn Joonkiat, Pachara Chirathivat, Pattarasaya Kreursuwansiri) need to find another source, stat. This brings them to calling Jesús (David Asavanond) from the torn-up business card that Jack found in his ex-dealer’s place. They have to guess the last digit in his phone number, yet to their own surprise, Jesús picks up after the first try.
Countdown kicks off like other movies about misfits scraping by in life and learning how to be adults the hard way. Bee is thrilled to learn she and Jack aren’t having a baby as she first suspected, Jack is still pocketing the tuition money his father sends him from back home in Thailand, and Pam’s desperation to be loved leads to petty theft. It’s understandable if the younger characters are hard to stomach; they’re blatantly obnoxious and entitled. Of course it’s their immaturity that fuels the main conflict; Jesús, the traveling drug dealer who bears a slight resemblance to his biblical namesake, doesn’t appreciate being the butt of others’ jokes.
The movie fully enters thriller mode after teasing it earlier. There was always something “off” about Jesús, but when he pulls Jack’s pants down and spanks his ass with a spatula, all bets are off. Countdown becomes more and more unpredictable as the drug dealer reveals a hidden agenda and holds his clients hostage in their apartment. This branch of the “home invasion” subgenre requires a believable setup to warrant the turned tables, and a drug deal gone bad isn’t the worst way to get the ball rolling. Of course Jesús’ motives for attacking Bee and the others has less to do with a faulty transaction and more to do with their innermost secrets.
There’s more to the story than the basic premise suggests, and viewers can appreciate this serpentine quality. As terrifying as it is to be held hostage in a bathtub, with a nail gun in your face, Jesús’ vested interest in these three party kids is more daunting. There’s a certain Shyamalanism to Countdown’s antagonist, who isn’t the dolt he originally made himself out to be. Asavanond’s cunning performance, delivering jacked-up and holier-than-thou craziness scene after scene, isn’t one to miss. His co-stars assume the position of victims, though their previous sleepiness is nowhere to be found now that they’re being tortured, one by one.
Countdown, for the most part, occurs solely in the protagonists’ barebones apartment. Had someone not run out to find help in the deserted building, the movie could be likened to a stage play. Limiting the characters to their own home robs the script of any particularly memorable set pieces, though. Bee and her roommates are either menaced in the off-white bathroom, or they’re roughed up in their yellowy living room. The domestic location is more minimal and drab looking than one might like, yet this adds to the overall unpleasantness.
There is no visual transition between the movie’s tones to speak of, but the narrative swerve into perverse torture is organic. Jesús is a walking red flag, so satisfying audience expectations was the only way to go. Where Poonpiriya bends genre rules is inviting an element not routinely used in other home-invasion stories. It adds an unexpected sense of surrealism that glues dangling plot bits together. At the same time, it invites more unanswered questions about the strange world these characters live in. What spurred this unforeseen revelation, and why did it happen tonight? You can only infer an answer, based on the ending.
Countdown doesn’t do what other drug movies do, and that is playing the story out like a bad bender. In spite of several peculiarly uncanny moments between captives and captor, the story is sobering and rooted in harsh realism. It’s not a fanciful New Year’s Eve for these unfortunate characters who only wanted to enter 2013 as high as a kite. Although, the questionable and somewhat underserved conclusion is removed from reality. There isn’t anything individually likable about Countdown; everyone sits somewhere on a spectrum of loathsomeness. As soon as Jesús begins bestowing his patent brand of cruelty on these misguided brats, though, this thriller picks up and becomes a darkly fun way to ring in the New Year.
Horrors Elsewhere is a recurring column that spotlights a variety of movies from all around the globe, particularly those not from the United States. Fears may not be universal, but one thing is for sure — a scream is understood, always and everywhere.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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