A Year of Movies #2: The FINAL Final Destination...dear God please let it be the last...

The Final Destination...

Okay, so you know the plot. Some person gets a glimpse of a terrible accident before it happens, and he and some others avoid death only for it to find intricate ways to kill them. It is essentially a gore filled R-rated version of the Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons we saw as kids. Only when Wile E. Coyote gets shot off on an Acme rocket and slams into a wall, in this movie the person explodes in a bloody mess.... Just going to let that sink in for a minute.

That said, this is the 4th movie in the franchise and it is by far the worst. The elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions that kill everyone are so horribly designed that they might as well have Zeus ride down from the skies and zap everyone dead. The acting is also, understandably, terrible.

The sad thing is that the first film in this series was really creepy. Mostly because the "bad guy" that was after the survivors of an airplane crash wasn't a monster like Freddy Kreuger or Jason, it was death itself. The very act of the "killer" being a personification of death made it quite creepy. You can't bargain from death. You can't run from death. You can cheat death (as these movies show), but only for a while. And usually when death finds you, the manner in which you die this time is far worse than it would have been had you not cheated it the first time. The point is, death can't be stopped. That alone gave the first movie this eerie feeling. Not IF these people would die, but WHEN and HOW. By the third film, and definitely with the last, they essentially turned it into a, usually less than 90 minute, movie that sets people up to be killed off one by one in interesting ways.

Sadly, the last film didn't even get that right. There are some movies that I watch just to see how awful they can be, this ranks up there with some of the best of the worst. Even with that I can't say watch it. The reason you watch bad movies is to make fun of them ala Mystery Science Theater 3000, but when a movie is this bad you can't even make fun of it.