31 Days Of Horror: Day 15: The Final Destination

Whelp here  we all are for one final time. Intially supposed to end the series with a bang, a 3D!!!! bang (Seriously you haven’t seen this much stuff fly at a movie screen in a horror film since Friday The 13^th Part 3), The Final Destition brought back David Ellis to take things out with a bang, and a kapow… and a brain hemorrhage (Too bad that James Wong didn’t direct Part 5 in order to keep the symmetry going). 

I have to say I do like the Ellis installments significantly more than the Wong ones. Ellis ups the ante, knows how to build tension and most importantly seems to have an innate skill at misdirection that makes some of the modes of shuffling off the ole mortal coil genuinely surprising. As well as pretty funny.

You know how it goes by now, premonition, disaster; all deaths will be answered in the order that they were received.

This time the twist is that the lead continues to receive premonitions as events continue, because death wasn’t being enough of an asshat I guess. And also that most of the people saved were fairly reprehensible.

Yep The Final Destination ditches the whole likable cast and clever plot thing from Part 2 and instead focuses on running through as many kills as possible. The characters are transparently meat puppets filled with blood, even by the somewhat lenient standards of character depth in the fourth installment of a horror film. The film barely limps past the 80 minute mark and that’s with significant padding. Also problematic is a depressingly predictable over reliance on CGI. I doubt that so much as an ounce of Karo or latex was used in the film and it’s so distracting that originally I wondered if the film was going for a PG-13 before realizing, “No they’re just really bad at this”.  Needless to say the film plays faintly ridiculous in 2D with CGI models of hooks and nails and shit occasionally flying at the screen inbetween scenes for no other reason than Holy Shit 3D.

And yet I have to admit I had more fun during this installment then I had during either one or three. Look no ones going to mistake this for a great horror film- ever. I know it’s derivitive, I know it’s a cash grab I know it’s kind of dumb. But it’s also the only installment that manages to have an ending as deranged and chaos filled as its opening, has at least one sequence (The salon) that legitimately had me on the edge of my seat.

Not bad for the fourth installment of something I wasn’t that crazy about in the first place.