The 5 Final Destinations Nation

The most effective teen horror films, like HALLOWEEN and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, know that closed-down gold mines or prom trains or the moon or other weird settings don't scare kids; you need to get them where they live--suburbia. The FINAL DESTINATION series gets that, and attacks us where we live, in the minutiae of modern life via quick cutaways to the million little things that add up to huge accidents. There are enough innocuous-in-themselves-but-they-all-add-up safety hazards in this five films (so far) to line the walls of a dozen nurse's offices, a gold mine of anxiety that no other horror franchise has bothered with. All those tiny moments every day where we almost die, or suddenly realize how easily we could, like nearly getting plowed into by a bus, and those sudden panicky urges to get off the plane after the door's already sealed or to jump off the roller coaster car right at the top of the first big incline. Most of us just take a deep breath and let the mood pass, but what if we didn't?

The stories all start the same, a group of teens or young adults at an event or on a journey to some other destination that ends with one of them having a grisly premonition, freaking out, and saving his or her immediate cronies, plus some random others, from their meant-for death. But this premonition has upset the natural order, so death has to run around claiming the survivors in the exact order they 'should' have died. Sometimes death is more clever than others, but always death shows a flair for Rube Goldbergian coincidence chains, and since most of the blood is CGI and glows a dark shiny red, there's no sick in the gut feeling over the gore, just what Pauline Kael would call a 'dirty kick' - a remembrance to being a very young child and alert to all the tiny things that might add up to kill you, and to being an older child, drawing nasty decapitation contraptions instead of concentrating in algebra class.


I would love to see a version where some super shy kid has one of the premonitions and is afraid to raise his hand. and so just quietly sits there, trying to hide his shakes, as everything he saw go wrong goes wrong. That would have been me, during the early 80s slasher boom. I was way too cool to pretend I wasn't terrified, so I just stayed frozen with a sunglassed smirk and waited for death to chopper me out of the ring. It never did, so hey, Death, "thank you," I guess?

I've lectured to enough stone-quiet college kids to know my brand of morose teenagerdom is endemic to America, and that's just one reason why the Final Destination series wouldn't work as well if set outside the USA, where we're embarrassed about dying, like it's dandruff or an STD. And if it's inevitable, then we still have to fight it! Death is wrong! Evil! This is, of course, unfair to death. It's nothing less than old-fashioned Puritan dread, as is obvious in the first few films especially, wherein the 'precog' of the group is treated like a monster by the saved and their parents, which may sound like the opposite of the 'death is evil' mentality but not really. The type of American who is afraid of--and embarrassed by--death is also equally drawn to it, and because true bravery is an accusatory affront to the cowardly (unless they can admit they're cowards, but they seldom can, as their heads are buried too deep in the gun-nutty sand of patriotism and intolerance-disguised-as-freedom), they hate the person whose foresight saves them just like they vote for war but against aid to returning veterans, and for more anti-terrorist legislation but against health-care for 9/11 first responders.


 The Europeans shake their head sadly at this weird counter-intuitive behavior, but of course they've all already been bombed. The American who live in unbombed states secretly long for death (like Francis Macomber) and resent not having a chance to prove themselves, they resent in fact even being put in the position of feeling resentful. They fear having to prove they're not afraid, and blame those who 'made' them feel that way.

Another unwritten American fear underwriting the Final Destination Nation is the melting-pot burn. We know that by being dragged off the ride or out of the audience before the big crash we now have to meet our fellow survivors and fight off death with them, so against our will we cease being a passive spectator of our own lives and become the viewed, the object of death's gaze. We pay good money to be able to avoid our neighbors, in the darkened rows of theater seats and tract homes, and now that our lives are saved, the lights are on and these gays and minorities want us to talk to them. Instead of being afraid of a monster we're expected to embrace all living things as part of our collective experience. Instead of living in our constrictive view of what it means to be Americans, we're forced to becomecontinental and existential, even compassionate. 


But what makes these films 'fun' is the way the idea of preconception and paranoia makes us psychic (as viewers) in ways we're normally not; we learn to recognize death's movements in random events, and that it has a sense of humor, loves to fake us out and surprise us. It's doesn't traumatize in its devious design. No single figure of malice presents itself; there is no bogeyman who can be barricaded out. This invisible Rube Goldberg coincidence time-space serpent instead occupies the same 'no space' omnipresence of ourselves as viewers. In a sense, to paraphrase the Bhagavad Gita via Robert Oppenheimer, through the FD series now we are become death, the destroyer of worlds.

Here they are in order:.


FINAL DESTINATION (2000) - **1/2
The plane crash opener is solid, but this film falls off from there. Devon Sawa is too solemn and sweaty and it makes no sense why he would still go out of his way to save the life of the main dick who torments him all the time, for no real reason (either for the saving or the tormenting), or why the dopey fed who suspects him of foul play regardless of the facts doesn't bother to Fox Mulder for past premonition cases. And Sawa does himself no favors, racing into the houses of those he reckons are about to die, indirectly causing their deaths, getting their blood all over him and leaving fingerprints and shoe prints in the blood before running off. I've known dumb kids like this in real life, and one of the reasons I've never been arrested is because I always just walk away when they start acting like this, so why should I stick around now?

The love interest, a girl with the great character name of Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) exudes fresh odd final girl Wednesday Adams-style resilience which makes up for Sawa's glum posturing. The other highlights include a visit to a mysterious undertaker (Tony "Candyman" Todd) who dispenses cryptic advice, and a great middle section with Devon alone in a cabin, 'death-proofing' every last corner and jagged edge, helps us through the dumber moments. Overall this gets by more on chutzpah than ingenuity. The series got a lot better once it limited death's palette to the freaky but possible, requiring much more Rube Goldbergian ingenuity on behalf of the writers, and scaled back the unlikely associations of total douche bags with the heroes and heroines.


FINAL DESTINATION 2 (2003) - ***1/2
A big step up from the first one, with a great catastrophic highway accident opener. This time the teen gifted with grisly premonitions is female (A.J. Cook), and the return of Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) in full final girl glory (the scenes in her padded cell are hilarious) means two final girls. And there's far less teenagers involved and more a random assembly of highway mergers. Some of the more obnoxious characters are a cokehead biker and a douchey tool who just won the lottery. Your money's no good here, douche! Death works pro bono. I like when they all decide they have to move in together and start death-proofing one of their numbers' studio loft, as if preparing for an MTV Reality show season, where death acts like Heidi Klum. And here death operates with a Rube Goldbergian plausibility factor several notches up from the predecessor.



FINAL DESTINATION 3 - (2006) ****
The Citizen Kane of FD movies, this is the one that got me into the series because it's always on IFC. Mumblecore goddess Mary Elizabeth Winstead is ideal as the survivor-psychic; when she freaks out at the roller coaster we realize we've never seen her so undone, even in THE THING!  She has a hot younger sister, a decently repentant boyfriend (of her dead friend) and an unusually witty group of cliché stock teen peers. Deaths are foretold in photos she took while waiting in line for the coaster, which is guarded at the front by a giant red demon statue (Tony Todd supplied the voice).  It adds up to a particularly wry entry, with tons of loving horror fan in-jokes (characters have last names like Romero, Freund, Dreyer, Ulmer, Wise, Halperin). The deaths are, as always, spectacular, leading up to a clumsy but amusing fairground fireworks finale with a runaway white horse, and an anticlimax at the hippest of all locales, la NYC subway.

THE FINAL DESTINATION (4) - 2009  -**
I have no idea why the powers that be decided to call this 'The Final Destination' -- is four a bad luck number in junk sequels? It would be forgivable if it didn't use 3-D as a crutch. And the climax, set in a 3-D theater showing a movie with a big explosion that will happen literally at the same time unless the hero stops it blah blah, isn't nearly as meta if you're seeing it at home in 2-D. Nice idea though. And occasionally there's a nice child's eye view sense of the dangers all around to which adults are oblivious and there's a great but under-explored side bit with a security guard in AA who tries to off himself, and all the while has a glass of brandy poured-- which every good AA-er always harbors secret fantasies of immanent death as an excuse to relapse (see my review of 2012 - Day of a Million Relapses!) - it would have been great if he did relapse, instead of just forgetting all about that brandy. Yo, finish your drink! Instead this installment is a little too heavy on the X-ray bone breaking animation (and unrealistic CGI blood) which only recalls that cable TV show 1000 WAYS TO DIE. 

FINAL DESTINATION 5 (2011) - ***1/2
This go-round we're on a suspension bridge with a busload of employees bound for a corporate retreat. The craziness that ensues looks good even in 2-D, and the nasty stressing of gore over fun in the previous installment is gone and, while less casual than the third, it's still got a nice hint of indie hipness about it, like a big budget Roger Corman production directed by Joe Dante or Lewis Teague. This time it's discerned that if you kill someone while on your borrowed time they can take your place, so the ubiquitous distraught douchebag buddy decides it's only fair he kills the hero's girlfriend, etc. The ending brings us all the way back around to the first film in a nice surprise loop-de-loop, showing death's wicked sense of humor and whole raison d'etre for starting this whole catch-and-release mess to begin with.

 Special mention to the hottest girl in maybe the whole series, Olivia (Jaqueline MacInnes Wood) who is killed while strapped into a Lasik eye surgery machine, thus ensuring I will never get that operation. I predict big things for this tall, lanky, at-ease-in-her-own-skin Elizabeth Hurley-Megan Fox-Sophie Marceau-ish beauty. I hear from Wikipedia she's already a 'fan favorite.' Count me in, except I once dated a girl who looked like her, but she wanted a whole me, not just a half. And she wore no glasses, and is now old and looks like Anna Magnani.


What, is that off-topic? WRONG! Only true, jaw-dropping, youthful beauty--the kind its possessor can radiate casually and without the poison of disdain--can allay the terror of mortality. We cling to such loveliness like we might hold onto a slowly deflating helium balloon over a shark-infested sea. Soon age, and show biz, and unworthy Svengalis will siphon the air out of Woods' loveliness and in a mere half-century or less, she'll be old, in another, turned to dust. Oh, Paula! Oh, Lenore! Oh, Annabel Lee! Oh, To stop time
for just a second,
those precious minutes of Woods' radiance
like grains of sand
I hold in the waves...

how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream? (- Poe)