Yeah, I do tend to check out some oddities that I skipped in the past, but I really am trying to fill in most of that “Must See Movie” poster, and for some reason, it does include the first of the Final Destination movies. Is it really a “must see”? I don’t know. It could be the poster makers just needed to fill the 1500 movies titles in with something and figured why not.
That said, there are some movies I don’t plan on seeing ever. There’s no way I am ever going to watch The Human Centipede. But I did watch Final Destination, so here we are.
A high school senior class is headed for Paris when…wait, Paris? What kind of high school trip is this? My senior trip was to Disneyworld.
Never mind. A senior trip is heading to Paris when student Alex Browning suddenly has a flash of the plane going up in a series of accidents that leaves everyone on board dead. He panics and needs to be escorted off the plane with four other students, plus a fifth who was in the bathroom and missed the initial boarding, plus one teacher who volunteers to follow up with the group in the morning. And then the plane blows up, leaving the group as the sole survivors because they weren’t on the plane like they were supposed to be. Alex’s visions make the teacher very wary of him, the FBI look into him as a possibly suspect, and many of his surviving classmates are kinda freaked out by him.
And then, not long after that, Alex’s best friend Tod dies in a freak accident in his bathroom. Alex got a flash before that happened, so he happened to be nearby. Oddly enough, Tod isn’t the first to die a weird and violent death when another classmate is hit by a speeding bus in front of the others. It seems Death, or the invisible force that basically is Death, won’t let them survive and is killing off the survivors in the order they should have died in the most gruesomely convenient way possible.
So, basically, this is in many ways a standard supernatural slasher movie where a group of attractive young people without much in the way of individual personality are picked off one by one. Heck, even the teacher doesn’t look that much older than the students who are, of course, the standard twentysomethings playing teenagers. These are nondescript characters where the most distinctive of these characters is one played by Seann William Scott, and that’s mostly because Scott has such an outsized personality as it is. There’s a brief appearance by horror icon Tony Todd as a mortician, the closest thing this series has to a reoccuring character, and he has the right sinister vibe, but really, this movie suffers from lack of a distinctive character.
As I see it, the popular slasher movies of the 80s and 90s did as well as they did when the people behind them realized the killer was the protagonist the audience could root for. Here, the killer is, well, just an unseen, mute something that causes Looney Tunes-style deaths. That’s not much to go on. If the characters are too thin to really care about, and the killer isn’t even something we can see or hear coming until small things start happening and someone dies a bloody death, then this isn’t really much of a horror movie. I know the crazy violence is basically the only real draw, but that isn’t the sort of thing that will bring be back.
That said, I do recall director James Wong and his producer partner Glen Morgan wrote a lot of X-Files episodes I liked, and this movie did start off as an X-Files pitch, and they did go and name most of the characters after old horror movie producers, actors, and directors, so there’s something to be said for trivia in this movie even if the movie itself didn’t much work for me.
Grade: C
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