Final Destination (USA. 2000)

When I approach a film that I slavishly adored as a kid for all the wrong reason (There’s violence! Swearing!) I have to realize that I'm going to be sorely dissapointed when I watch it again with my mature all-knowing adult eyes. The two sequels deliver buckets of gore, but completely ditched character and narratives. They weren't actually films. They're the shiny modern equivalent Mondo Death Documentaries that where super-popular in the VHS days: Killing Clip Shows. The one glimmer of hope I could cling too is that the first film in a franchise should on some rudimentary level actually good. That’s why people want more of them! Right? Maybe they just poisoned our water supply to like crappy movies. That would explain a lot actually.

Alex (Devon Sawa) is about to head to Paris on a field trip with his French class when he has an awful premonition: The plane is going to explode. He panics like a madman and gets kicked off the plane (dragging a few other classmates with him) and just as everyone’s calling him crazy, BOOM, the plane turns into a fire-ball. It turns out they were all supposed to die on the plane but thanks to Alex’s psychic vision, which is never explained, they’ve foiled death plan. They may be alive for now but an unstoppable life force is PISSED and now it’s out for blood. I hope no one is looking forward to their prom.

Ditching the hip and retarded character clichés that haunt most modern day Horror films, Final Destination succeeds at giving us reasonably intelligent kids reacting to an completely out there situation. The big draw here is that the director and writers are massive classical horror fans from the outset. Every frame of the film is built from the ground up. The characters are named after horror directors, the camera moves smoothly and the score is classic scare movie stuff from Shirley Walker. Keep your eyes peeled for foreshadowing of how everyone is going to die within the first fifteen minutes! Its specific movie nerd stuff that no one will ever consciously notice (Unless you’re a movie nerd and you listen to commentary track *coughcough*), but it still means that the filmmakers actually cared instead of wanting to pump out the product of the week. Never seen again on a theater screen (He currently resides in Direct to Video Hell) Devon Sawa is great as the poor kid who has to make everyone believe that a unseen force is out to kill them because they deserve to die (Isn’t that God’s job?) The rest of the teens are pretty disposable, in the literal and figurative sense, and they don’t make much of an impression unless you count the blood that splatters onto the survivors. It doesn’t disappoint on the gore factor, but it’s still baby steps for a series that became famous for its crazy Rube-Goldberg type machines. It’s not nearly as gratuitous as part 1 or 2 and for that reason alone the whole film feels classier. For the bargain bin price it goes for these days, it’s well worth a spot in any horror fans collection

NOTE: The original ending (Available on the DVD) was a lengthy meditation on the nature of death and the fact that everyone dies one day. Audiences hated it. They replaced it with the SHOCKER ending that caps the current version of the film. I have to agree with the audience on this one.