THE FINAL DESTINATION (2009)

[indianasmith]

     This franchise is one of my guilty pleasures.  It combines the traditional lure of slasher films (stupid/horny twentysomethings getting sliced and diced in original and creative ways) without any of their baggage (no increasingly invincible villain to kill off and then resurrect, virtually no recurring characters).  The first movie in the franchise tried very hard to be a serious, very scary horror movie, only to ruin the whole thing by throwing in an ending that was pure dark comedy.  But the sequels got it right - or at least got it better - in that they abandoned the pretense of being  "serious" horror films and instead focused on giving us improbable and bizarre kill scenes with a revolving cast of characters.

The premise here is familiar enough - a group of young folks miraculously survive a horrific disaster, only to have death stalk them and kill them one at a time.  In the first film it was an airplane crash, then a freeway pile-up in the second one and a roller coaster crash in the third.  This time it's a NASCAR catastrophe that kills 52 spectators - except for 8 or so, who are warned when one of them has a precognition and they all get kicked out of the racetrack moments before a car flips into the crowd and causes a partial stadium collapse.  Then, one by one, they begin to die in various bizarre manners as death tries to settle its score with them.

It's all familiar ground, but the kills are pretty good in this one, and the survivors are a fairly eclectic and attractive group.  The single best death scene, IMO, is where the Casanova style, jerkish male character is shufffled off this mortal coil by



SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

having his entrails sucked out of his buttocks by the pool drain he inadvertently sits on!


If you like the franchise, you need to see this movie.  It's very fun.

[InformationGeek]

I've never liked this series.  The kill scenes are creative, but  having a whole franchise that is just about killing off people annoys and bores me.  Which is why I'm not a fan of slasher films or the Saw series.

This movie is just like the others, but the ending seems cheap and rushed like the first film.  Just quickly killing off people at the very end seems like the producers and writers thought, "Oh crap!  They are still alive!  We can't have that!  Let's just randomly come up with something quick and wrap this up!"

Ugh.

[hellbilly]

This film was hilarious. Bad movie lovers should get a kick out of this one. Haven't laughed that much during a movie in a long time!
On a sidenote, the 3D works perfectly fine on my HD set up. A few scene actually made me jump. Fun stuff 

[Neville]

I love the firs film, I also regard it as a thinking man's slasher. And its dark humour it's welcome here, like in the scene were the female teacher dies at home, just the whole overkill level had me laughing out laud. I though the first sequel was OK, if only for the set piece of the multiple car crash at the start, but didn't care much about the rest. Number 3 I found abominable and an insult to the viewer.

This hopefully final instalment falls somewhere between 2 and 3. IMHO it tries too hard to be a guilty pleasure. Some of the kills are good, and so is the opening scene. The rest of it, a mixed bag. The characters are not as annoying as they were in #3, but I need to root for them to get my fun, and I couldn't care much about what happened to them.

[3mnkids]

This was my least favorite of the franchise. yeah it starts off with a bang and some of the kills are pretty cool but, I dont know really I just didn't care for it. I will buy it of course because I have the others and I must complete the set   

on a side note.. someone should tell Krista Allen to lay off the plastic surgery for awhile, she looks ridiculous.