Head Count (Movie Review)

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

PLOT: A group of twenty-somethings partying in the California desert accidentally conjure an evil force that can mimic anyone's appearance.

REVIEW: College student Evan (Isaac W. Jay) clearly isn't happy that he's going to be spending his school break time with his hippie brother Peyton (Cooper Rowe) out in the desert of Joshua Tree, California, so it seems to be a lucky turn of events when a group of nine twenty-somethings see him during a hike and invite him to smoke some weed with them. Unfortunately, when the group decides to tell some scary stories around the campfire Evan checks the creepypasta website AnonymousNightmares.com and discovers the existence of a creature called the Hisji.

Text on the screen at the beginning of HEAD COUNT warns us about this: "A Hisji is a vengeful thing, five times its name you never sing, with skin pale white and eyes of green, it's something you've already seen." Problem is, Evan already says "Hisji" out loud five times before he even starts reading the rhyme that tells you not to do that, so he has unleashed the evil force on this group of partiers.

Ten characters is a lot for a movie to deal with, and the story crafted by Michael Nader and HEAD COUNT director Elle Callahan plays into the fact that you can't really get to know these ten different people within a 90 minute running time. We join this group through the perspective of outsider Evan, and we never learn all that much about the people he's partying with. A couple of them have character traits that stand out, but for the most part they're interchangable and pretty much blank slates. So when the shapeshifting Hisji infiltrates the group and starts taking the form of different people, it's easy for the viewer to get just as mixed up as Evan. Is someone missing from the group? Wasn't that person in a different place a second ago?

There's a quite a bit of that sort of confusion, because HEAD COUNT takes the slow burn approach. We spend most of the movie just watching these people play games, smoke weed, drink alcohol, talk about 'shrooms. Evan embarks on a minor romance with the only single person in the group, Ashleigh Morghan as photography enthusiast Zoe. We know the Hisji is messing around here, but what's the goal? Just to perplex people? It will be eating in the kitchen while the person it stole its appearance from is outside, or playing a game with one group while the person it looks like is playing a game with someone else in a different room. But what's the point?

While the Hisji's antics make people go, "Hmm, that's odd," nothing outright scary happens to them for a long time, we're just stuck watching characters viewers aren't likely to care about. I didn't even like Evan, who is so bland and awkward that it was tough to see why Zoe was interested in him. As HEAD COUNT's characters play drinking games, viewers play the waiting game, and when a movie has a long build-up the pay-off has to be worth the wait. When things finally go completely haywire here, by which time the movie is almost over, it isn't very impressive.

I didn't find this to be a satisfying movie overall, it wasn't eventful and I didn't enjoy spending time with these characters, but I can't say it's a bad movie. It is well made, features an effective score composed by Hannah Parrott, and comes off as being a solid feature debut for Callahan. The actors do fine with the material they were given to work with. There's just not enough going on here, I didn't feel like the resolution was worth the time I had invested to get there.

Callahan shows promise, but this isn't a movie I'll be revisiting.