Final Destination 3

Final Destination 3

I really dig the overall premise of the Final Destination films. You can almost imagine the creators locking themselves away in a room trying desperately to dream up some new horror movie villain to slaughter nubile teens one by one and fill the Jason/Freddy/Michael Myers void, and eventually just thinking Fuck it! Let’s just make the villain Death itself. Everyone just sees films like this for the deaths anyway (and sometimes tits) so why not trim the fat? So we now have three films that blatantly revolve around inventive ways to kill off their pretty young casts.

Of course these grizzly kills are as a result of the main characters cheating death in the first place thanks to a premonition saving them from disaster: a plane exploding in the first film, and an awesome car crash pile-up in the second. The Final Destination 3 posters and previews promised an epic roller-coaster disaster that had me drooling, but which in actuality is the weakest opening act of all three films, mainly due to most of it being constructed with sub-par CG. Nothing is worse in film today than shitty CG. Okay, maybe Hilary Duff movies, but after that it’s definitely bad CG.

The rest of the film’s splatter-fest fares a lot better as it falls in synch with the usual Final Destination shenanigans. While the first film’s deaths were akin to a gruesome game of mouse trap as a series of household objects and an inordinate amount of bad luck combined to off an unsuspecting teen, and the second film delighted in the stupid intricacy of its elaborate deaths with comedic gusto, the third time around the deaths are just plain nasty. A few of them are bound to have some looking between their fingers, but are great for gore fans who will no doubt skip straight back and watch them again and again. And that’s what these films are all about. You really should know that by now, so don’t complain if you don’t like it.