Final Destination

[Andrew]

I finally had the chance to watch this and was more than a little let down.  You know what killed the film for me?  The writing used a sledgehammer where a featherduster would have worked best.  I am talking about how Death was not about to be cheated.  All the way up to the main character's friend being strangled I was enjoying myself, then that idiocy happened.

What was needed was a little finesse.  Show a series of highly unlikely events that lead up to a character's death or make it just come out of nowhere (like the one girl and the bus).

Missed chances...

[odinn7]

Andrew...
If you didn't like the first one, number 2 is out of the question.
I saw the first one when it came out on DVD and I didn't really like it but I harbored no hatred for it either. The second one was on one of the Starz channels a few nights ago and I figured I would watch it. I have this to say about it: I want my 90 minutes back...It was horrible. The idiocy was rampant throughout the movie and I came away from it feeling a little po'd. It seems like it was written just to cash in on the first one with the mindless masses.

[Ash]

I liked the first one but I TOTALLY agree on the second.

The sequel is one of the WORST films I have ever seen.

[eeeee5]

.  .  .  .  They got the original splatter king, Herschell Gordon Lewis, to appear on the bts stuff on FD #2, so they were trying to do an ode to the Grande Guignol style HGL "invented" (I agree, that in contemporary terms it is true, however John McCarty credited Hammer w/ 1st exhibiting this, then ceded it to HGL in contemporary terms).  Haven't seen his so I don't know if the style "homage" was successful, but Sean William Scott was great in FD #1 (so alone, so alone on this one probably).  Ohh, Tony Todd (Hahahaha).

Joe Clarke in "Basket Case":
"All alone in this cold cruel world."

[Brock]

The second one is hilarious.  They just went all out in setting up bizarrely elaborate death scenarios.  Cheesy, but cool.  Granted, if you thought the first one was over the top, then you may want to avoid the second one, but I thought it was good fun.

[JohnL]

I liked both movies because they didn't follow the normal pattern of a psycho killer stalking the kids.

[Neville]

I liked the first one quite a lot. I still use to think about it as the thinking man's slasher. At least they found a way to avoid the masked killer cliché and to move things into the supernatural, which avoids the consistency problems of regular slashers. And of course, the death scenes are great. They are ellaborate and show a healthy dose of wicked humour (I love the moment when the main character leaves the house of another character with a bloodied knife, for instance).

Number 2, however, it is quite bad. It is a fun film to watch, but has enormous plot holes, no sense of humour and ends up as notyhing else than a group of death scenes badly connected. I hope they never do a #3. Oh, and if they do, please eliminate Tony Todd's stupid appearences, please.

[Brock]

No sense of humor?  I thought #2 was basically nothing *but* humor!

I think a #3 would be absolutely terrible, mainly because after the first one where death was linear, and then the second one where they tried to justify death working backwards along the list, there's really nowhere they could go that wouldn't be totally absurd.  "We caused a rift in death's design!  It has a list of us in the order of which we would have been killed, but he's dyslexic.  Also, he decided to go by every other prime number just to make it interesting..."

[Kirk]

The second one apparently takes place in a world with no Ralph Nader, judging by the way the cars explode.  

Not that a world with no Ralph Nader would be a _bad_ thing...

Kirk