A hell of a ride

I sat up watching Final Destination 3 -- my latest Netflix -- last night. I obviously couldn't watch it with Anna around and Heidi really hates those horror flicks anyway, so it was a good movie to watch after Anna'd gone to bed and Heidi was still in Atlanta. I've always liked this series of films, even though it really doesn't amount to much more than another in a long series of "dead teenager" movies. However, since the thing turning the teenagers into dead teenagers isn't some stupid unstoppable guy in either a hockey mask or a William Shatner mask, but is rather death itself, it has a cool factor that remains three movies into the series whereas the Halloween and Friday the 13th series are just parodies of the original movies.

Basic plotline: High school girl has a premonition of a fatal roller coaster accident which results in her and 6 of her friends being spared death by roller coaster. I have to say that this was a pretty cool opening scene, although it lacked the punch of the original's plane explosion. At the time that I saw the original Final Destination, I'd never flown before and after seeing that, I vowed I'd never fly -- it freaked me out that much. The second movies massive car crash was cool and very realistic. But the novelty of the roller coaster grabbed me from the beginning, so much so that I almost went to see this in the theater. Granted, it would have been the dollar theater, but the theater nonetheless.

Back to the plot -- since these kids cheated death by rollercoaster, death stalks them. One by one, they're picked off in bizarre accidents in the order they would have died had they stayed on the roller coaster. And there were some pretty original, pretty gruesome deaths to be had in this movie.

The thing I love about these movies is that they don't take themselves that seriously. They know that they're basically a gore fest and don't have any false pretenses at being fine cinema. I think it's possible for the horror genre to produce fine cinema (although, admittedly, it hasn't done so in recent memory) but the Final Destination series is just a bunch of films that are like going to the haunted house at Halloween. They're gory and gross and disgusting but make money hand over fist because that's what horror fans want. Plus, they're actually scary and also somewhat suspenseful, which is saying a lot considering that what follows the initial big accident is a series of rather predictable deaths. It kept me on the edge of my seat, wondering who was going to get killed next and how and if they were going to cheat death again.

I'm thinking I may have to get the Final Destination triple pack DVD set.

And I'm definitely not ready to send the movie back yet, as there's a feature that allows you to change the course of the movie by deciding whether or not a character gets killed or not. I really want to try out that feature!