The Final Destination

Whenever a new 3-D film is announced, I inevitably see comments online from fans griping about how 3-D is just a gimmick and a cheap fad. These complaints always strike me as hilarious - especially coming from horror fans. When people whose movie collections are likely home to a lot of straight-up garbage are so concerned about the sanctity of cinema, that's some funny shit! I mean, honestly, as a horror fan whose own movie collection is brimming with B-movie detritus, I feel like I should be the last person to bitch about how 3-D, of all things, is eroding the quality of modern movies.

But if you do have a stick up your ass about 3-D, The Final Destination will vindicate all your bitter complaints about the format. This is a film that has no reason to exist outside of exploiting the 3-D experience. Up until now, this year's My Bloody Valentine 3-D was the best modern 3-D horror film (not that it had much competition) but while MBV 3-D may remain the better film overall, The Final Destination is really the 3-D horror film I've always wanted to see.

When 3-D briefly came back in the early '80s, I was too young to see R-rated films but I knew that in Parasite ("the first futuristic monster movie in 3-D!" as the posters claimed) there was a scene where someone was impaled with a length of pipe and that blood dripped out of it over the audience (nice!). And I was told that in Friday the 13th Part 3, Jason squeezed someone's head so hard that one of their eyeballs popped out of their head and off of the screen (eeaugh!). As a thirteen-year-old in 1982, I couldn't believe how incredible these movies sounded! 3-D gore was where it was at! Sadly, though, it didn't take long for the 3-D craze to fade out. But as soon as I saw how much the technology had advanced with Beowulf (2007), I knew that 3-D would be coming back in a big way. And where there's 3-D, there's always 3-D horror films.

Some would say that The Final Destination lacks interesting characters, an involving storyline, or any imagination outside of its scenes of slaughter. And they'd be right. But then again, this is a movie where someone is slammed into a wire fence with such force that diamond-shaped chunks of their body are squeezed through it and these bloody chunks then come loose and fall into the audience. That's where this movie's priorities lie and if you don't recognize that, you need more than 3-D glasses to see. To the credit of director David R. Ellis (encoring from 2003's Final Destination 2) and screenwriter Eric Bress, though, The Final Destination is always smartly self-aware. Whatever faults you might cite about this movie will not be news to its makers. What Ellis and Bress do well here - outside of expertly exploiting the 3-D - is have fun playing up the ghoulishness of the series (the opening credits are brilliant, replaying in X-Ray vision several deaths from the previous FD installments) and gleefully prolonging the audience's expectations of when and how each character will meet their maker. This is an aspect of the series that I think has been its strong suit all along, the constant reminder that death is always around us, hiding in plain sight. No matter what harrowing death one might escape, another one is waiting in the wings.

While I liked My Bloody Valentine 3-D, I think the makers of MBV 3-D felt some reluctance at their film being tagged as a cheesy 3-D horror movie and so they kept the reminders that it was a 3-D film in check. MBV 3-D was still a lot of fun just the same but thankfully the makers of The Final Destination aren't as worried that you might think their movie is disposable junk. In fact, they make it impossible to see it any other way. In the course of its slim 82 minutes, The Final Destination is out to claim the 3-D horror crown and even though it pretty much earns that honor in the first ten minutes, director Ellis doesn't take his win for granted. Instead, he acts like he has competition on his ass right up until the end credits.

Notably, The Final Destination is the first FD movie to deliver a rousing climax. Even in Ellis' otherwise exciting FD2, the film disappointingly petered out before the end but in this fourth go-round, FD's producers have learned to save something good for last. Here, there's a climatic scene inside a mall that rivals the opening race track disaster. Perhaps realizing that this would be the last of the series, the producers wanted to ensure a spectacular farewell. But while some would say this 3-D blowout should mark the natural end of the series, I think there's one more date with death that still has to be met. Let me just put a bug in the ear of FD's producers now for Final Destination 2012: Death's Big Score. The series needs to leave us with one final lesson: if you're going to die, let it be epic.

By Plane, By Car, By Bike, Bye Bye!

The trailer for Final Destination 4 - aka The Final Destination - has already been online for awhile now but I didn't want it to go by unmentioned here. Original franchises are few and far between these days with studios turning to remakes and reboots of past classics to interest movie goers rather than sequels - the exceptions of the current decade being the Saw series and the Final Destination films (with Hostel's would-be franchise status stalling out with Part II). But while the Saw series has done little to interest me, my affection for the Grand Guignol-meets-Looney Tunes antics of the Final Destination films knows no bounds.

For me, FD is the perfect horror series. They're live-action splatter cartoons, void of pretense but with just enough slickness via their studio backing to be spectacular. And I love that with every FD film, things essentially start at square one. There's no baggage to carry from film to film and that's how it should be. The more the Halloween series became burdened by the convoluted Strode family lineage and by the Cult of the Thorn, the shittier it got (and then it got even worse). And look at where Saw series has ended up with its endless flashbacks - and flashbacks within flashbacks - involving so many characters you have to be Jigsaw himself at this point to comprehend what you're watching. With FD, however, there's no on-going characters to remember - none that matter, at least - no lingering plot threads, and most importantly, there's no villain to run into the ground.

By refusing to personify Death, the makers of the Final Destination series have given fans the peace of mind of knowing that every character's final exit won't be followed by a lame pun or bon mot. Death also doesn't care about anyone's life choices so there's no chiding his/her/its victims with insipid moral lessons. Whether you're a junkie or a schoolteacher - or both - it doesn't matter. And because Death is an invisible, indefinable force, FD fans will never have a shit backstory shoveled to them about Death's white trash's upbringing, thereby spoiling Death's mystique for all future sequels. And for all this, I'd like to tell the FD producers "thanks".

While some jackasses like to whine that no FD sequel has bothered to expand on the series' mythology, that's exactly why the series is still worth a damn. There's no story to advance, it's just the same story every time. The appeal of the series is in its Omen-esque set-pieces. And unlike the Omen series, the FD films don't have to carry the Bible on their back the whole time. There's no prophecies to avert or fulfill, just the hand of Death. And personally, that's more likely to make me nervous. With The Omen, as long as you don't get too nosy about the Anti-Christ, chances are you'll be fine. But with the FD films, we're all on an equal playing field. Death overrides all beliefs or superstitions. It's not about whether you're on the side of God or the Devil and there's no Book of Revelations to keep you forewarned. It's not even like a Friday the 13th movie where Jason is pissed you're smoking dope in his woods and he feels that he owes you a machete in the head. It's just about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's about surviving a car crash but then the air bag deploys and rams your head through a steel pipe.

That, to me, is scarier than any horror villain. Jason, Freddy and Michael Myers are all make-believe boogeymen. And depending on your faith, you can say the same about the forces of Hell. But you can't be a skeptic about Death itself. That shit is real. Having each FD protagonist experience precognitive visions is as much fantasy as these films need. And really, I'd argue that they don't even need that.

For now, based on this trailer, it looks like FD hasn't lost a step. I imagine it'll be tough for the next FD to top the excitement of a 3-D entry but the thing about Death is that it comes back stronger every time.

The Final Destination trailer in HD