Just as Glen Morgan and James Wong returned to the franchise they helped to instigate with the enjoyably heartless FINAL DESTINATION 3 (following the less sadistic but creepier and more sincere 2000 original), the director of the second instalment in the franchise now returns to make the fourth entry. Given that Ellis made the spry, witty and spectacularly violent FINAL DESTINATION 2, this built up expectations for a nasty, funny summer sequel. Especially with the added 3-D gimmick, which Ellis relishes using in the old-school horror fashion (more so than this year’s MY BLOODY VALENTINE) : thrusting sharp things, snakes, splashing blood, etc into the audience’s face.
Although it’s fun, fast paced and easy on the eye, this gimmicky “Real D” sequel turns out to be a lot less spectacular than was hoped. In fact, while you don’t expect much other than formula at this stage in a franchise, the most disappointing thing is how uninventive it is. It’s all very well paying homage to moments and characters from the earlier films (a water company named Clear Rivers, a title sequence full of visual references to deaths and accidents previously seen, the number “180”), but surely it’s just being lazy when a key character complains of having déjà vu right before falling victim to an abrupt bus-induced fatality that duplicates a key shocking death from the original.
In the first sequel, Ellis instigated a rollicking 90 minute death-carnival with one of cinema’s most terrifying and impressive freeway pile-ups. In the fourth movie, he stages an equally elaborate and devastating disaster at a speedway race track, complete with flying tyres that obliterate craniums and two simultaneous bisections, all in glorious 3-D…but somehow it’s not as impressive. Maybe it’s because, a few years on, CG has taken over to a larger extent and nothing much about the sequence looks real, from the fire to the fatalities.
Eric Bress’ script is content to follow the formula set by its predecessors with no real variation or attention to character. It continues the fan boy trend of naming characters after other genre directors (this time an amusing bunch – check out Wynorski, Cunningham and O’Bannon!) and has even more one-note characters than FINAL DESTINATION 3. Protagonist Bobby Campo is in serious need of a personality transplant, suffering the usual premonitions and this time convincing two others (without any opposition whatsoever) of the usual “Death’s Plan” shtick. Everyone else is a cliché or a cardboard cut out : Mykelti Williamson plays a widowed alcoholic on the brink of suicide and the movie (which elsewhere has flippant deaths for broadly sketched racists and gear heads and MILFS and male bimbos) bizarrely seems sincere in its efforts to make this cornball figure a sympathetic character.
Still, characterization is hardly a key concern about this franchise, so what about the deaths, the series’ raison d’etre? Sadly, here the movie lets us down also. Ellis expertly sets up complex pre-death scenes in which multiple potential threats are used as extended misdirection before the real source of horror becomes apparent : particularly suspenseful and well done are sequences in a hair salon and a car wash (the latter, alas, without a satisfying pay-off). But the imagination well seems to have run dry this time out : it’s less overtly grisly than any of the earlier films, with only a rousing escalator splattering and a swimming pool goring worthy of a hearty cheer. This from a guy who, in FINAL DESTINATION 2, gave us the all-time classic plate-glass crushing of a young boy and the elevator beheading of his dear old mom. Shame.
It’s a nippy movie, but, even at this length and pace, the dialogue groans in between deaths as characters blandly try to figure out how to cheat Death just as all of their predecessors have done in earlier installments. A lot about the movie suggests that Ellis and Bress approached it as a sick comedy (characters sup lattes in a café called Death By Caffeine ; one admittedly exciting interlude takes place in a theatre showing a 3-D action movie), but, if that’s the case, the movie should have been broader, bloodier and more outrageous.
Studio interference might be responsible for the rushed feel of certain aspects of this movie, especially its anti-climactic ending, which lazily offers a variation on the shock coda of the original while denying us proper on-screen carnage. It’s still an enjoyable ride, with a kill every few minutes (including a cartoonish racist being set on fire and dragged by his own pick up truck, and a hospitalized character getting a heavy bath dropped on him from above just like in a Warner Bros cartoon) and loads of eye-poking 3-D gags…but it could have been awesome.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
