Final Destination (film)
I just got the double meaning of the film title. On one side Death is the final destination on the other side the film is about the premonition of a plane crash, which was the Final Destination for many in the film, even those who survived the plane crash only to be stalked by “Death’s Design”
Not much of a slasher for a slasher film, but it was an interesting premise because it was a killer in a slasher film you cannot see. I watched Eli Roth’s History of Horror and to wonder if this stands up for the Masters of Horror. Like I said the premise for the film is pretty interesting. The question is does it stop going down in horror history because the whole… “Design” of the movie is all about the jump scares. I saw this movie before but how it works on the Entertainment level is that I have not seen it in possibly 20 years, so I don’t remember each death in order. Those jump scares make the film exciting.
The film is also of the particular error of “Pretty White kids with Problems” not that this has not always been a staple in horror movies from day one, but in the mid to late 90s there seem to be this particular push that felt like it was on purpose, because it was. Ali Larter, Sean William Scott and to a lower extent Kerr Smith (who I feel is a dude I only know because I grew up during this time period), were names that appeared in a lot of teen movies at a time when the teen movies were diverse in the sense that the lead actor of this movie Devon Sawa was in this horror movie around the same time he did the teen comedy Idol Hands and the Teen drama Wild America. If you were a pretty white kid and could pass for a teenager, you were a big enough star power to get a film like this greenlit.
What shocks me more is that they were able to come up with five more films on the same subject. I would have never pegged that. I know that the cameo appearance Tony Todd made in this film was used again in sequels but he’s not the Candy Man in this movie. There is no Candy Man is just a group of pretty white kids in a series of action sequences made to put you in suspense about how they die.
In fairness this does work, and like I said before it works best when you have not seen it before or have not seen it in so long you don’t remember how people died.
