Harefooted Halloween: Final Destination

What I Liked: Neat Twilight Zone type concept about a teenager, Alex (Devon Sawa (Chucky)), who has a premonition involving the plane he’s about to travel on exploding right after takeoff.  Several other of his friends/classmates bail off the plane with him and the events occur as he predicted.  Death doesn’t like this so he settles the score by going after each survivor.  They’re all meant to look like (insane) accidents to avert suspicion.  The first act in particular does a good job setting up the mysterious circumstance that leads to mixed emotions by all those affected.  Some are grateful for Alex saving their life and others hate him for being the catalyst of their trauma.

We’re all here for the deathtraps and yea, they’re fun.  While I would only categorize one as being straightforward the rest are Rube Goldberg type concoctions that consist of several moving parts and pieces.  In fact they throw in so many red herrings of what you think will happen that it becomes impossible to predict the true outcome in any situation.  Since the Reaper is orchestrating all of this I’m fine with it.  Of course there’s the question of why can’t he simply make someone have a heart attack?  ‘Cuase this is a movie and we need to be entertained goddammit.  Case in point: one victim gets a giant shard of glass straight to the throat, suffers a gas explosion, a knife to the chest and finally a full on house explosion.  Ok, the filmmakers may have gone a bit overboard with that one but it brought a smile to my face and made me laugh out loud.

What I Didn’t Like: This isn’t a huge negative but the characters are pretty bland.  It’s your usual assortment of teens like a bad boy, a doofus, an outcast, a middle-of-the-road kid, etc.

All the stuff in between the elaborate deaths isn’t very intriguing.  Alex attempts to figure out what Death’s grand design is and how he can break it.  I understand we need to have the characters do some investigating and make an effort to save their lives but the entire thing feels futile.  How can you fight it?  They would have to venture down a distinctly more paranormal path to even have a chance, which they don’t do.  With that said…

Overall Impressions: One of the selling points for me is I dig how the film isn’t too supernatural.  But yes, the Reaper undoubtedly exists here and is pulling the strings.  Actually, he shows up in the form of wind and some sort of amorphous floating transparent blob.  The filmmakers wisely decided to make everything look like an accident, a ridiculous freak accident, but an accident nonetheless.  That lends a nice unpredictability to the scenario.

This is a good time.  While it starts off kinda serious laying a sturdy foundation to get you invested things ease up when the bizzarro killings begin.  You can tell the filmmakers were having a ball because the movie ends on a joke instead of a big time scare or ominous beat like most other horror pictures.