'Countdown'

The thriller “Countdown” doesn’t break new ground in PG-13 horror — but it’s quick, efficient, and gets the job done.

The premise is everything: At a high-school party, a bunch of beer-drinking teens dare each other to try a new app that will tell the user exactly how long he or she has to live. It’s all fun and games, until one girl, Courtney (Anne Winters), sees that she has only three hours to live. When she avoids a ride with her drunk-driving boyfriend, Evan (Dillon Lane), the app flashes a notice — “user agreement broken” — and something dark and unseen makes sure she dies when the countdown clock hits zero. 

After introducing the set-up, rookie writer-director Justin Dec settles in on the main story. That starts with Quinn Harris (Elizabeth Lail), a newly graduated nurse, in the same hospital where Evan is soon to undergo surgery. Evan is in a panic, because his death app says he’s going to die on the operating table, and he also gets the dreaded “user agreement broken” notice before dying messily and mysteriously.

Before Evan dies, though, half the hospital staff tries the app — and Quinn learns she has three days to live. She tries various technological means to disable the app, to no avail, though in the process she teams up with Matt Monroe (Jordan Calloway), a nice guy who’s also working on very short time. Quinn and Matt, taking along Quinn’s teen sister Jordan (Talitha Bateman), go to a priest (P.J. Byrne) whose alarming fascination with exorcisms makes him ideal to explain the internal logic of demon narratives.

Dec sets up the horror sequences with a minimum of fuss, and some solid old-school scares. He also injects a nice bit of humor, mostly through Byrne’s overeager priest. Where things go off the rails is when a #MeToo subplot, involving a handsy doctor (Peter Fascinelli), makes an unwelcome return in the final reel.

“Countdown” isn’t too original, with notions about cheating fate that come right out of the “Final Destination” series. But it delivers the goods enough to satisfy one’s appetite for not-too-bloody horror on the weekend before Halloween.

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‘Countdown’

★★★

Opens Friday, Oct. 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for terror, violence, bloody images, suggestive material, language and thematic elements. Running time: 90 minutes.