Final Destination 3

I figured I would only post if I had just seen the movie, while I'm still buzzing over it. That's the best time to review a movie - when you still have the raw emotion swirling around your brain. Wait too long, and you get influenced by other people's opinions. Also, logic starts to set in, and you start overanalyzing it. You know, "Why didn't she just go to the police?" or "Why did that truck explode?" ...the logic that, if ever actually implemented, would strip the entertainment off the movie's bones, leaving a boring (but believable) skeleton.

So it's actually somewhat fitting that my first review here is of Final Destination 3, a movie with little logic but plenty of entertainment. Well, if you're into that sort of movie.

I could easily sum up this movie in four words: "More of the same." Make no mistake, this is practically a remake of FD1. Another group of teens narrowly avoids an accident, and then gets picked off by Death one by one. But who cares, right? If you've seen the other two, you know what the movie is really about: Seeing what new, creative, and gory ways the FX artists can kill people. And on that, it delivers.

I'm not going to try to justify my love of bad horror movies here. Slasher films are a great time for rebellious teens, and a guilty pleasure for those same people once they grow up. I was never a rebellious teen, but I've always loved bad horror.

But back to the movie. FD1 was innovative - Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers all have their weak points, but what do you do when you're being stalked by Death himself? How do you prevent getting killed by "bizarre coincidence?" The death scenes were both graphic and creative, and the subject matter made it one of the most frightening of the slasher genre.

FD2 may have had the same plot, but it did throw in some creative twists - most notably the relationship between the new victims and the ones from the first movie. FD3 added nothing new to the series. It could probably have been a direct-to-video release, if not for the high-budget death scenes. The slayings in FD3 are even more contrived than before. Each death plays out like a Rube Goldberg device. During some of the drawn-out ones, I kept playing the tune "Powerhouse" by Raymond Scott (the factory music in Bugs Bunny cartoons) in my head.

A couple of issues - the two generic valley girl characters were so incredibly stereotypical, that they weren't even remotely believable. Also, a lot of the scenes were drawn out to extreme lengths, in an effort to add more drama and suspense... Hey, guys, it's not that deep a movie!

This is already more space than this movie deserves, so let me sum up: It's a bad movie, but I like it.