Final Destination: Thrillogy (2000-2006) [3x Full Blu-Ray CEE]

The team of Glen Morgan and James Wong was well-known to fans of The X-Files and its distant cousin, Millennium, for their clever, original and frequently shocking takes on horror material. When they made their feature film debut with 2000's Final Destination – Wong directed, Morgan produced, both of them wrote, from an original script by New Line staffer Jeffrey Reddick – their fans hoped for something different, and we weren't disappointed. Working from an idea that, ironically, had originally occurred to Reddick as a concept for an X-Files episode, Morgan and Wong crafted a screwball twist on the classic teen slasher genre spawned by Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth. Instead of being methodically eliminated by an indestructible psychopath, the cast were stalked by a paranormal force representing Death itself, perceptible only to someone with psychic powers, whose predictions, like Cassandra's, brought him only sorrow.

Neither Wong and Morgan, nor Reddick, ever expected to create a franchise. Their original title for the film was Flight 180, after the airline disaster that sets the plot in motion. It was the studio brass at New Line Cinema, a studio founded on a successful franchise, that had the commercial instincts to insist on the generic title "Final Destination" over the objections of the writers, producer and director, thereby ensuring easy "branding" for sequels if the film was a success. Thanks to the story's novel elements and the superior craftsmanship brought to the project by Morgan, Wong and an interesting cast that played their parts straight while getting the joke, the film did well enough to spawn four sequels (to date).

The metaphysical conceit of Final Destination is that Death (with a capital "D") has a plan for us all. If something interferes with the plan, Death seeks to restore the intended order, like a natural system seeking equilibrium. Of course, this pseudo-mythology is just a pretext for Wong and Morgan to stage unnecessarily elaborate but freakishly entertaining (because they're both scary and comical) death scenes that are a cross between the demonic punishments of the Omen films and a Rube Goldberg machine.

The person who interferes with Death's plan is Alex Browning (Devon Sawa), a high school student joining his class for a school trip to Paris. (The name is a reference to Tod Browning, director of Dracula and Freaks. All the character names are film or inside references.) A nervous flier so superstitious that he saves the baggage tags from the last successful flight completed by his luggage (actually his dad's), Alex turns out to have good cause for being nervous. He's a psychic who sometimes foresees disaster just before it happens. Shortly after boarding the Paris flight, he experiences a vivid vision of the plane exploding immediately after take-off and jumps up screaming that they're going to crash. Even in a pre-9/11 world, this kind of behavior gets him ejected from the plane, along with one teacher, Mrs. Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke), and five other students who are caught up in the melee. One of the students, Carter Horton (Kerr Smith), is furious at Alex, and the two are being pulled apart when the plane they just exited explodes in midair, killing everyone who remained aboard.

There's shock, tears, copious reports, interviews with a representative from the NTSB and hard stares from two FBI men who find the whole thing suspicious (Daniel Roebuck and Roger Guenveur Smith). And, of course, the parents of the teens who survived are deeply grateful, even if they don't really understand what happened. The sole exception is Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), who is an orphan. Clear is exceptional in another way, because she affirmatively followed Alex off the plane, somehow sensing the accuracy of his premonition. Now she wants to help Alex understand the true meaning of his remarkable prediction. The other survivors treat him with anger, fear or, like Billy Hitchock (Seann William Scott), as a sideshow fortune teller.

Alex's and Clear's inquiry becomes more urgent when one of the survivors, Alex's best friend, Tod Waggner (Chad E. Donella), is found dead in his bathroom, an apparent suicide. We in the audience know different, of course, because we've seen the complex contrivance of household items guided by an unseen hand that took Tod's life. Alex and Clear break into the funeral home to get a close look at the body, where they encounter a spooky mortician named Bludworth played by the incomparable Tony Todd (who would become a recurring figure in the series). It's Bludworth who explains about Death's plan, which sends Alex on a quest to decipher and try to outwit it.

Using Death as a villain liberated Final Destination (and its sequels) from many of the practical absurdities that eventually dragged down the Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth series, with their indestructible, omnipotent and omnipresent killers. Here, the killer really is indestructible and everywhere – and since his (its?) weapons are whatever happens to be lying around, one just has to apply a litte imagination. The film may not be deep, but it's well crafted with the same wickedly warped sense of humor that Morgan and Wong brought to their best X-Files work. (The death of Carter's girlfriend, Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer), is a particular crowd-pleaser.)

Indeed, when the filmmakers tried to add a more profound note with a conclusion suggesting Death could be outwitted by creating new life, it fell flat. (This alternate end and unfavorable reaction are detailed in the extras.) The ending was reshot, and the film was released with a conclusion that hews to the story's "through line" by closing with another elaborately staged demise. When you've done such a fine job sending your story racing down one particular track, you just have to ride it all the way to the end.

– Review by Michael Reuben, August 31, 2011

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The same studio brass that had the foresight to change the original film's name from "Flight 180" to Final Destination understood exactly what they wanted in a sequel, and it wasn't the witty genre parody that broadened the film's appeal to a larger audience including people like, well, me. They wanted the core horror audience consisting primarily of teens who would buy tickets to see people killed in gross and unexpected ways. So they handed the reins to producers Craig Perry and Warren Snide, who had been there for the first film but whose real claim to fame was the American Pie series; they recruited writers Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, who were young, hip and had just sold New Line The Butterfly Effect; and they hired director David R. Ellis, a veteran stunt coordinator and second unit director, whose experience supervising onscreen mayhem spanned decades and included To Live and Die in L.A., The Perfect Storm and the Matrix films.

The result is slick and professional, but for my taste it's a crashing bore. (And yes, I know that phrase is a groaner for those who have seen the film.) As much as FD2 attempts to position itself as a logical successor to Final Destination – borrowing and even attempting to further its "Death's plan" mythology, and bringing back Ali Larter's Clear Rivers as a continuing character – the film lacks the original's paranoia and the sense of a paranormal world following its own inexorable logic. The deaths are all so obviously about misdirecting the audience that there's nothing creepy or supernatural about them. It's very hard to scare someone effectively when you make a lot of noise rustling around in the bushes before you jump out yelling "boo!" The most you can hope to do is gross them out with the bloody awfulness of your fright wig, which is where the makers of FD2 succeed best.

It's the one-year anniversary of Flight 180's crash. Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) is packing up her SUV and saying goodbye to her father (Andrew Airlie) as she embarks on a road trip with friends to Daytona. Pulling onto the freeway, Kimberly encounters ominous portents, including a school bus from Mt. Abraham High School (home of the ill-fated French class that died on Flight 180) filled with football fans chanting "Pile up!", and a kid in a passing car staring at Kimberly while miming a head-on collision between a toy car and truck. Shortly thereafter, Kimberly's vehicle is one of many smashed to bits in a spectacular traffic disaster caused by a logging truck that pops its cables and dumps its load onto the highway. Dozens of people are killed, including Kimberly.

At which point, Kimberly snaps back to the present, just as Alex Browning did before Flight 180 took off. She's still at the freeway entrance. Convinced she's just glimpsed her future and that of the drivers and passengers behind her, Kimberly blocks the freeway entrance with her vehicle, drawing the attention of a state trooper, Thomas Burke (Michael Landes), whom Kimberly saw mangled to a pulp in her vision. While Burke is trying to make sense of Kimberly's semi-hysterical explanation, the logging truck whizzes by and, shortly therafter, the pile-up begins, just as she predicted. Burke can't understand it, but Kimberly has just saved the life of everyone she blocked on the on-ramp. (Well, not everyone. But why spoil it for first-time viewers?)

So now the makers of FD2 have replicated the first film's setup: a group of survivors who have cheated Death due to a premonition, but who will be picked off one by one by increasingly bizarre and elaborate accidents. The difference is that the survivors are connected only by the random circumstance of having been on the freeway on-ramp at that particular moment. (An attempt, halfway through the film, to establish a deeper connection is strained, half-hearted and quickly abandoned.) Also, since they've all heard the weird stories about the Flight 180 survivors – a TV interview plays over the credits, providing essential exposition, and Trooper Burke seems to be something of a buff on the subject – they should all be prepared for Death's return visits. But most of the survivors don't believe all that superstitious nonsense until it's too late.

Then again, how can the characters be expected to take something seriously that the filmmakers themselves treat with such obvious disdain? For the creators of FD2, the "Death's plan" mythology is no more than a pretext for staging elaborate executions with as much gore and shock value as they can devise. Logic or consistency in the mythology is utterly secondary. To take an obvious example, late in the film a character hysterically puts a revolver to his head and pulls the trigger repeatedly, because he's tired of waiting for Death to take him and wants to go out at a time of his choosing. The gun never fires, despite being fully loaded. Six duds? Impossible! But, as someone else explains, "It wasn't his time." So what about all those vehicles that ended up in the highway disaster in place of the vehicles that Kimberly prevented from entering the freeway? It wasn't their time either; those people shouldn't have crashed.

Take another example. Kimberly seeks out Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) for help, because she's the last of the Flight 180 survivors, Alex Browning having died in yet another "accident" between the two films. Clear has had herself voluntarily committed to a mental institution, where she occupies a padded room from which any object posing a potential threat has been banned. Clear rarely allows visitors, but she sees Kimberly. Eventually she leaves the institution and leads Kimberly and Burke to our old pal, Bludhorn the mortician (Tony Todd). A visit to a mortuary is always good for more gross-out scenes, and the filmmakers get good mileage out of a crematorium and a nipple-ring. But since they still have to give Bludhorn some lines, they resurrect the theme of "defeating Death by creating new life" that was excised from the first film – but with a twist. This time around, they aren't talking about having children. They're referring to near-death experiences from which the victim is revived. Why this should be considered a victory over Death (since the revived person will still die) is never explained. In essence, the filmmakers have substituted word play for any meaningful effort to expand the series' mythology. The real purpose is to set up an apparent happy ending as misdirection for one final gross-out gag to close the film.

The original Final Destination took an innovative approach in its use of everyday objects as items in the Grim Reaper's toolbox. Not content with that approach, the makers of FD2 turn Death into a world class sadist, a kind of paranormal Jigsaw who seems to enjoy toying with its victims (though it's really the audience who's being toyed with). Thus, for example, an elaborate sequence plays out in a dentist's office involving nitrous oxide, a leaking aquarium, electrical malfunction, a mobile with defective strings and various other small details that conspire to put one of the characters at risk. But none of this turns out to matter. The real threat lies elsewhere. Everything in the dentist's office is equivalent to the typical cat that, ever since at least Alien, has been required to leap out at someone hunting something dangerous in the dark, so that he or she can jump, breathe a sigh of relief, then be attacked by the real monster – and be decapitated, pierced through the eye, crushed under falling glass, impaled on a pole, sliced into thirds by wires while entrails go flying, or blown to smithereens so that body parts land right in front of shrieking loved ones. Because that's what FD2 is really about, and that's entertainment.

– Review by Michael Reuben, September 7, 2011

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In a detour into good taste, the New Line brass brought back Glen Morgan and James Wong, co-creators of the Final Destination series, for its third installment. (Maybe the best picture Oscar for the third Lord of the Rings went to their heads, in a good way.) Not that they gave Morgan and Wong complete freedom. Someone had already made the decision to set the film's central disaster on a roller coaster, and everyone wanted to retain the explicit gore that had proven so popular with the hardcore horror crowd. But within these parameters, Morgan and Wong were free to reintroduce quality into the franchise.

The difference is obvious from the opening frame. Just as Morgan and Wong redid the signature opening credits for the season of Millennium they oversaw (the best of the series), they altered the introductory New Line logo on FD3, eliminating its upbeat theme and modifying its colors to blend into a spooky montage of deserted amusement park rides and foreboding carnival attractions. No weighing down the opening with dull exposition about Flight 180 or the highway disaster exactly one year later – these filmmakers understand that, if you've bought a ticket to a film with the number "3" in the title, you probably don't need (or want) the backstory. So they concentrated on atmosphere, just as they did in the opening of the original Final Destination.

But even the best suffer from creative exhaustion, and by the end of FD3 it had clearly set in. I'll come back to that later.

In McKinley, Pennsylvania, members of the senior high school class visit the local amusement park. Among them is the yearbook photographer, Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the blue-haired beauty whose exes Scott Pilgrim will have to fight). Accompanied by her boyfriend, Jason (Jesse Wise) and her best friend, Carrie (Gina Holden) and her boyfriend, Kevin (Ryan Merriman), Wendy snaps yearbook pictures of everyone from their class. The subjects include a football player, Lewis (Texas Battle); two airheads, Ashley and Ashlyn (Chelan Simmons and Crystal Lowe); a smarmy alum known as "Frankie Cheeks" (Sam Easton); two rebels with a mildly goth look, Ian and Erin (Kris Lemche and Alexz Johnson); and, though she's not a senior, Wendy's sister, Julie (Amanda Crew).

Wendy's friends want to ride the massive roller coaster known as Devil's Flight (voiced, in a sly cameo, by series regular Tony Todd). Wendy is afraid but gets pressured to accompany them. Just before the ride departs, she experiences a vivid premonition of multiple mechanical malfunctions that kill every passenger, including herself. Wendy becomes hysterical, insisting that the staff stop the ride, but they hustle her away, along with several other passengers. Just as they reach ground level, the Devil's Flight ride crashes to the ground.

This being a Final Destination film, we all know what happens next: The survivors start dying off in freakish, mysterious and, most importantly, grotesque ways. With FD2 having raised (more accurately, lowered) the standards for gross-out humor, FD3 has certain audience expectations to fulfill. (In the "Planned Accidents" featurette, producer Craig Perry can be heard urging director Wong to show a heart ventricle from a victim landing on the face of an onlooker. The director is unreceptive.)

But Morgan and Wong are fine enough craftsmen (even when working with genre schlock), and have enough confidence in their cinematic technique, to make their characters die from elements they've already shown the audience in great detail, instead of engaging in elaborate games of misdirection, like the hacks who made FD2. If two people are going to die on tanning beds, they show you the tanning beds, along with all their controls and operations and how they're positioned in the room. There's a deliberate and suspenseful build-up to disaster, giving the audience plenty of information that the characters don't have, just as Hitchcock recommended. (If the makers of FD2 had written the same scene, the victims would have emerged from the tanning beds unscathed, only to be incinerated by some accidental discharge from an unshielded microwave oven as they left the salon.)

Morgan and Wong also avoid another mistake made in FD2. Having invented the Death's plan mythology of Final Destination, they know enough not to get bogged down with it. Anyone who worked on The X-Files and Millennium understands that such mythologies function best when they're left vague and mysterious. Start trying to nail them down, and you'd better be prepared to do so as thoroughly as Richard Kelly in Donnie Darko. Do something in between, and it becomes half-hearted and inconsistent, which is exactly what happened in FD2. Here, Kevin, whom Wendy doesn't particularly like, is the one who looks up the history of Flight 180 and the highway crash a year later. But Wendy develops her own theory after she examines the pictures she took and sees foreshadowings of death in the imagery; then she starts to see the same thing in last photographs of famous historical figures who met with violent deaths. The photography motif allows FD3 to bring the Death mythology forward into the current film, without burdening it with a load of exposition carried over from previous movies. It's an inspired device, even if it was borrowed from The Omen (a point that isn't mentioned in the disc's extensive extras).

But as I said at the outset, even the best creative minds hit a wall at some point. Morgan and Wong couldn't think of an ending, and when the film was first shown to an audience, it simply ended after the extended sequence of events at a Fourth of July celebration. No one was satisfied, including the test audience. After much internal debate, a new sequence was written and shot, beginning with the words "Five Months Later". It's a technically proficient piece of work, but it feels just as tacked-on as its production history suggests, because it doesn't make a lot of sense. However, it does give a bloodthirsty audience exactly what they want. When you listen to Morgan's comments about it in the "Kill Shot" documentary, you can tell he's a little ashamed. And he should be.

– Review by Michael Reuben, September 7, 2011

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