Final Destination

Genre: Horror

Director: James Wong

Screenplay: Glen Morgan, James Wong, and Jeffrey Reddick

Starring: Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith, Sean Willam Scott, Amanda Detmer, and Kristen Cloke

As Alex is waiting to board a plane to France with the rest of his classmates for a school trip, he has a vision of the plane blowing up. He shakes it off and boards the plan, but when small things play out just like his vision, he realizes the plane would indeed explode. He causes a scene and tries to get everyone off the plane. Only a few of his classmates and a teacher get off with him, and they become the lone survivors of the crash, that is until the survivors seem to be killed off one by one by an unforeseen force. Alex starts to have more visions of his fellow survivors’ deaths, and he strives to stop what’s trying to kill them all.

I have always liked this movie, because it had an interesting story. Sure people were getting killed off in imaginative ways is this film, but it was who was doing the killing and why that made this a better horror film. The story plays with the theme of cheating death and whether or not that is indeed possible. I would like to believe that it is because of the story that three sequels were spawned, but alas, that is not how Hollywood likes to work. If the only reason for a sequel to be made in the land of horror was due to the original being top notch, we wouldn’t have nearly as many horror movies. It would be such a shame if Saw V was never made. Please insert a sarcastic tone with that last sentence. As much as I like this film, I only gave the second one a chance and found that it was not nearly as good, which is why I haven’t been interested in seeing the last two. They just don’t harness the delicacy of balance between the story and the deaths that the first one did. These sequels seemed to only have been made purely to up the ante as far as the character deaths are concerned.

The acting in the film was decent, nothing award winning, but I think that they pulled their characters off as well as to be expected, the exception being Sean William Scott’s exclamations right before he literally lost his head. As creepy as the whole you can’t cheat death concept is concerned, the creepiest part of this entire film is how they repeatedly used John Denver as a death omen with his song, Rocky Mountain High.

I give this film 3 Buttery Kernals.

Coming Soon: American Psycho