Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

43rd Kill

The least loved of all the Final Destination movies, a film so resistant to forging any kind of new innovations in the franchise it can't even call itself Final Destination 4, instead adopting a title that makes it sound to the FD layperson like it's actually the first movie in the series, a film so derivative and sloppily made that even Final Destination fans take issue with it... The Final Destination is all these things but... fuck it, it's still quite good fun, isn't it? Am I wrong? Am I wrong?!

This is almost like the film makers are breaking the fourth wall and saying, "Look, they didn't give us much money, we don't have the best actors, we only got Mykelti Williamson to take part because we pretended this was an origin story for his character in 24 - we know all you really want to see is a series of gore gags involving gross incompetence and unimaginable bad luck, so just sit down, eat your popcorn and leave us to do our job OK? We're tired."

I think everything that people dislike about this film actually enhances it in a weird way. Like, the direction of the actors is on the level of a shampoo commercial - e.g. watch what the actors do when they're not speaking. They're like NPC's in a computer game - even though the girls just said how they have no interest in watching Nascar, every time they're not speaking they just sit there beaming vacuously at the race track like no sight could delight them more. The over-reliance on really bad CGI gets to the point where it all feels tongue in cheek - big heavy things fall on people with all the simulated impact of a mouse moving a cursor on a screen - it looks like a Terry Gilliam cartoon.

Everything is played so dead straight, it becomes funny. Like when they try to convince the mechanic guy that he's in danger and he mentions how he's just trying to get over his girlfriend's death, and Mykelti just immediately launches into "I know how you feel. When my wife and child died in front of me in a car crash..." etc to a complete stranger without missing a beat and with zero emotion in his voice - he's far too good an actor for that to have been anything other than him taking the piss completely. I would really like to think there was a lot of hilarity going on between takes in this movie and I just don't want to contemplate the possibility that anyone was taking this very seriously. I mean, even the director, David R Ellis - he's no Martin Scorsese, but he did make Final Destination 2 and that film is miles ahead of this one in terms of basic competence (in fact, it's a genuinely, unironically brilliant popcorn horror flick, IMHO).

So once this started hitting me as a comedy, it worked quite well, because it's all nicely paced, there's nary a dull moment, and these characters are such dipshits and they keep demonstrating that in wonderfully kooky ways. I actually agree that it's the bottom of the pile as far as Final Destination films go (I've not seen 5 yet, but I've heard very promising things), but it's a case of a franchise where even the worst entries are worth a watch.

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

Lots of badly executed kills (the engine block falling on the hot mom, the guy in the pool - I mean, what happened there, did it suck his liver out through his butt cheek, that made no sense at all) but quite a lot of great kills too. I enjoyed the guy getting pushed through a chain link fence but mainly for comedy value because at what point did his spine and ribcage get removed from his body so that his torso was filled with nothing but Jello? But the best kill has to be the romantic lead, no less, getting sucked down into the escalator mechanism and getting minced into a hundred pounds of hamburger helper with one fillet steak left quivering on top of the mechanism. Yes, I know it was a premonition only and she didn't really die, but this is a movie; no one really died, you idiot.