Ten Days of Terror!: The Final Destination

Film: The Final Destination (Final Destination 4)
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

You do this long enough, you learn a few lessons. I watched We Need to Talk About Kevin some time ago and never want to see it again, but I didn’t bother to write it up. Now it’s on the They Shoot Zombies list, so I’m going to have to watch it again. What does that have to do with The Final Destination, a.k.a. Final Destination 4? It’s the only film in the Final Destination series that isn’t on the list. I’m reviewing it in self-defense. I don’t think it’s ever going to show up, but I sure as hell don’t want to sit through it again. This is entirely proactive.

The Final Destination is the low point in the series. There’s a reason it hasn’t shown up on the They Shoot Zombies list. While most of them have a sub-3.0 rating on Letterboxd, this one is the lowest by nearly a full point. There are reasons for this. In addition to me not wanting to have to watch this again, I’m hoping to prevent you from wasting the 82 minutes it takes to get through this one.

Ten Days of Terror!: Final Destination 2

Films: Final Destination 2
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

Credit where credit is due, the Final Destination movies did something different in the genre. In a genre as overloaded as horror really is, finding something that actually different in a significant way instead of just on the surface is actually noteworthy. The innovation, of course, is that there’s no bad guy. The thing that exists to kill off our series of (generally) young protagonists is, more or less, Death itself. The formula is that our characters are saved from a horrible accident by someone having a premonition. Since they were saved unnaturally, Death acts to right the score, killing them all in horrible ways that involve freak accidents. Final Destination laid down this particular set of workings, and Final Destination 2 picked up that torch and ran it a little further.

Our inciting incident in this case is a car accident. It’s one of the more famous scenes from any movie in the Final Destination franchise. A group of students are on their way to Spring Break somewhere, get onto the highway, and all hell breaks loose when a logging truck loses its load, sowing chaos and destruction everywhere. It’s actually pretty staggering—logs smashing through windshields pulping the drivers, people getting slammed into other vehicles, cars rolling and flipping, and more. Driver of the vehicle Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) has a premonition of what is about to happen and, rather than drive onto the highway, turns her vehicle on the onramp so that no one can get onto the road. When a cop named Burke (Michael Landes) steps up to get her to move, the truck that causes the chaos drives by, and soon thereafter a huge accident happens. So, same basic set up—our protagonists are the people who should have died in the accident and didn’t thanks to Kimberly’s actions. Oh, and we’re also told this is the one-year anniversary of the airplane crash from the original film.