Halloween Horrors: The Final Destination Series

Here is another in my series of quickie reviews, to help you get your Halloween viewing lists together.

One of the more interesting horror series out there is Final Destination. The name is taken from travel lingo, which is appropriate given that the series begins with an airline disaster. The double meaning is of course everyone's "final destination," death. The series features elaborate, improbable death scenes, and due to the way the stories are structured, many characters die twice.

[Editor's note: the first three movies were reviewed before part 4 and 5 had been released]

Final Destination (2000) - The first film centers around a teenager who has a vision as he's boarding a plane to France with his french class. A very vivid vision, which involves a horrific chain reaction of events which leads to the plane exploding. When he snaps out of it, and details start to match his vision, he freaks out and is removed from the plane, along with several friends, and his teacher. This was before 9/11, which is a good thing, because nowadays they would probably ground the plane, and hey, no movie.

After the group disembarks, the plane does explode, but the group that escaped starts dying one-by-one in the order they would have originally died had they stayed on the plane. A theory is cobbled together, that the characters "cheated death," and that death was working to set its plan right. But death doesn't just get them by natural causes. Death constructs elaborate Rube Goldberg-ian ways to do them in.

 

Final Destination 2 (2003) - The second film follows a similar setup, with a girl foreseeing a horrific multi-car pileup. It departs from the usual "kill the teenagers" formula by incorporating adults who are prevented from entering the flow of traffic by the girl. And it is linked to the previous film in a very novel way. Of all of these films, I've seen this one the most times. Here's a taste of what Part 2 has to offer...

 

 

Final Destination 3 (2006) - Part three again has a girl with a vision, this one predicting a roller coaster disaster, and preventing several friends from riding. It is only tangentially related to the other two parts, since 1 & 2 pretty much tied everything to each other. And while each film probably has realism problems (as do most horror films), the actual roller coaster accident is virtually impossible.

Parts 1 - 3 work very well when watched in sequence. The hook to all of them is the elaborate ways in which the characters are killed off, and the fact that there are both foreshadowing events, as well as red herrings. For the most part, the acting is well done and believable. And the effects are pretty spectacular.

None of these films is particularly scary. In fact, because the death scenes are so wacky, it almost works as comedy. The setups (plane crash, car crash, amusement ride tragedy) are relatable. Very few of us have not imagined such a scenario happening to us when we fly, drive, or pull the safety harness down. So they are unnerving. If you have any phobias about these things, you may actually get a jolt. But mostly, the special effects and gore are pure entertainment. If you're into that sort of thing!

Part 2 was my favorite, because of the novel way they wove the storyline together with the first. And the car crash is spectacular (as is a surprise event that happens right after). This movie had the best fake-outs, making you wonder exactly how they were going to do the characters in. And it takes risks that divert from the usual scary movie pattern.

 

Part 3 disappointed me the first time I watched it, because the link to the other two is tangential, and frankly unbelievable. But upon review--if you suspend disbelief on how quickly the protagonists figure out what is happening to them--it's actually not bad, and a decent entry into the series. And it takes the ultimate risk, with a surprise ending that goes totally against the horror movie rules.

[Now, parts 4 and 5]

THE Final Destination (2009) - Given that moniker, you would think it was the last one. It was also in 3D, and heavily promoted as the final installment. It was fun--involving a NASCAR racetrack-type disaster. I'm a binocularly-challenged person, with the unfortunate inability to see 3D movies. But I liked FD4, just the same. I thought it was better than 3, less than 2, about the same as 1. I'm in the distinct minority here, as part 4 is almost universally regarded as the worst of the series.

Final Destination 5 (2011) - That another sequel followed the "last" one wasn't surprising. What was surprising, was that the fifth movie would be as good as the rest of the series, or better. In fact, it's as good part two, and better than the original. It is also in 3D, incidentally.

Horror movies tend to be derivative. And part five can't offer originality. But the special effects, the acting, the surprises? Part five has them in spades. The only flaw for me was the law of diminishing returns. The spectacular opening can't be matched in later set pieces. While I had a lot of fun, the thrills tend to get smaller by half with each dramatic demise. If they had only ended the picture with a dramatic finale on the scale (or 3/5 of the scale) with the opening.

 

 

In conclusion, if you like elaborate, gory special effects, and you are tired of mindless slasher pictures, any of these films will satisfy you. And while the characters die in horrific ways, this is not Hostel or Saw-type torture-porn. Unlike Friday the 13th-type movies, you don't need nostalgia to have fun with them, and don't have to settle for "so bad, it's good." These flicks are actually well made. Just have your remote at the ready! You'll want to slo-mo something in all five movies!

 

Final Destination: Recommended

Final Destination 2: Highly Recommended

Final Destination 3: Recommended
THE Final Destination: Recommended
Final Destination 5: Highly Recommended

Halloween Horrors: Miles Fisher's Horror Parody Videos

Here's a repost of a Halloween Horrors post I did last year. For the last few years since Final Destination 5 came out, I've been expecting the actor/singer in these clips to get really famous. Not yet, apparently. But he's very talented. Take a look.

ORIGINAL POST:

Miles Fisher is a very attractive young man, looking like a cross between Tom Cruise and Christian Bale. Not surprisingly, he has impersonated both on film. Perhaps his most notable role so far has been in the horror film Final Destination 5, in which he has not one but two death scenes. Apparently, Fisher got on well with his cast from that film, since he got them to participate in one of his music videos, a gore extravaganza that melds Final Destination with--of all things--Saved by the Bell.

So, Halloween is the perfect time to feature both his New Romance video, described above, along with his American Psycho homage, This Must Be the Place. Both are very inventive, and enjoyable, and demented. Plus, he's ridiculously handsome. How can you go wrong?
 

Halloween Horrors: Miles Fisher's Horror Parody Videos

Miles Fisher is a very attractive young man, looking like a cross between Tom Cruise and Christian Bale. Not surprisingly, he has impersonated both on film. Perhaps his most notable role so far has been in the horror film Final Destination 5, in which he has not one but two death scenes. Apparently, Fisher got on well with his cast from that film, since he got them to participate in one of his music videos, a gore extravaganza that melds Final Destination with--of all things--Saved by the Bell.

So, Halloween is the perfect time to feature both his New Romance video, described above, along with his American Psycho homage, This Must Be the Place. Both are very inventive, and enjoyable, and demented. Plus, he's ridiculously handsome. How can you go wrong?
 

Mini Movie Review: Final Destination 5

The Final Destination series is one of my favorite movie franchises, horror or not. The first one was one in a series of "teen stars in horror film" movies with a poster of four or five kids in a row with a logo. It was in there with Scream and Urban Legends and countless others. But FD had a special something. A sadistic glee, an inventiveness with which the victims were dispatched.

And then, the awesomeness was cemented with Final Destination 2. The plane crash disaster of part one was surpassed with an incredible freeway pileup! And the batch of nubile teens was offed! Right at the beginning! FD2 upped the ante by playing by part 1's rules, and making it better by linking all of part 2's characters with part 1's. Everything hooked together and made sense, and kablooey, a cool ending!

Then came part 3, which--unfortunately for me-involved amusement rides. I come from the industry, so I know that the roller coaster disaster in that installment couldn't happen that way. But undoubtedly, none of the disasters is 100% authentic, so, whatever. Part 3 didn't hook into the first two much, but is better to me than it first appeared. It is quite enjoyable for what it is.

Part four was entitled THE Final Destination, and by that moniker, you would think it was the last one. It was also in 3D, and heavily promoted as the final installment. It was fun--involving a NASCAR racetrack-type disaster. I'm a binocularly-challenged person, with the unfortunate inability to see 3D movies. But I liked FD4, just the same. It was better than 3, less than 2, about the same as 1. But who could know there would be a part 5?

I  should have known. I've been through, Friday the 13th V: A New Beginning. I've seen, Amityville II: The Beginning. I've seen Wes Craven's New Nightmare. I'm sure there'll even be Psycho: What You Really Didn't Know, is That It Started Like This! So, an unremarkably named Final Destination 5 wasn't surprising.
What was surprising, was that the fourth sequel would be as good as the rest of the series, or better. In fact, it's as good part two, perhaps as good as the original.

Horror movies tend to be derivative. And part five can't offer originality. But the special effects, the acting, the surprises? Part five has it in spades. The only flaw for me was the law of diminishing returns. The spectacular opening can't be matched in later set pieces. While I had a lot of fun, the thrills tend to get smaller by half with each dramatic demise. If they had only ended the picture with a dramatic finale on the scale (or 3/5 the scale) with the opening.

My rating: **** of ***** (with a nod to the genre, of course)

Indiana State Fair Tragedy

Image from source, HuffPo

Yesterday, I took in a movie with friend and contributor, Stupid Monkey Planet. We chose Final Destination 5, the latest in a franchise of horror movies with grisly death scenes. The movie was very entertaining, for what it was. But on our separate ways home, both of us kept seeing potential death traps. It took a while to shake it. And then, we were both amazed to see the collapse of the stage at the Indiana State Fair, something that could have been straight out of one of the Final Destination films.

Having a background in the amusement industry, I'm always pulled back into it when a tragedy like this happens. Wondering if the tragedy could have been prevented, if anyone is to blame, or if it truly was just an act of nature that couldn't be predicted. In any event, I'm sad for the injured and killed people and their families. It's always jarring when something like this happens in an entertainment venue.


[Excerpt]


Indiana State Fair stage collapse: 5 dead; singer relates horror

The death toll has risen to five in the stage collapse at the Indiana State Fair in which 45 people were also injured.
The main stage collapsed on a crowd waiting for a Sugarland performance Saturday night at the Indianapolis fair after being blasted by winds as strong as 60 to 70 mph, according to the National Weather Service. . .

Read more at: LA Times

Miles Fisher Teases Final Destination 5 with Gory Music Video

I didn't remember how I found Miles Fisher on Facebook. A while back, I just noticed a picture of a man who looked like Tom Cruise holding a flag in my news feed. The other day, I clicked it, and instantly remembered: he's the guy who did the Tom Cruise impression in the otherwise only marginal Superhero Movie. In addition to the wicked Cruise impression, Fisher did a music video a while back that covered a David Byrne song, but as an homage to Christian Bale's American Psycho.

So, Fisher is apparently a talented impressionist, a good singer, a bit warped (in a good way), and amazingly good looking (hello, he looks like a combination of Cruise and Bale).  I decided to check IMDB to see if Fisher was in anything else I was familiar with, and there was the listing for Final Destination 5. I'm a fan of the whole FD series, and I doubt I'd have skipped this one in any case. But I'll definitely watch it now. Especially when Fisher has tapped into my love of pop culture and gory movies with a Saved by the Bell/Final Destination parody for his latest music video.

The video for New Romance manages to parody the already near-comedic deaths in the FD series, and skewer Saved--one of the worst sitcoms ever--at the same time.



And because I can, here is the stellar This Must be the Place (warning: somewhat NSFW).






UPDATED TO ADD: Oddly enough (see the Rick Perry post immediately upthread), I think Miles Fisher could impersonate the Governor of Texas. Look at those arched eyebrows!

Mini Movie Review: The Final Destination

Image from Wikipedia

I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that The Final Destination--the fourth in a series of slick horror movies--was being sold as a combo Blu-ray/DVD in both 2D and 3D versions for under $20. That's quite a value compared to other recent releases. The set also includes a "digital copy," something I've yet to find a use for, as well as two pair of the standard 50s-style red and blue 3D glasses.

Now, I really dug the original trilogy (which you can read about here), so I eagerly anticipated this one. For some reason (most likely procrastination), I didn't get around to seeing it in the movie theater. So I got it on Tuesday, and made time to watch it today. I darkened the room as best I could, put the cardboard glasses on over my own specs, and fired up the Blu-ray 3D version. I watched about 5 minutes, and gave up.

Not that it was bad. But the cardboard glasses are clumsy, the red and blue is distracting, and I have a built-in eye problem from birth that makes focusing that hard extremely difficult. So I switched to the 2D version. And I've gotta say, the 2D Blu-ray had a stunningly clear picture. So I didn't feel so cheated after all. As in the other three films, the actors were capable. The complicated Rube Goldbergian death scenes were inventive and cringe-worthy. Neat! A tiny effort was given to tying this movie to the others, but not so much that it was anvil-worthy. I liked it.

Until the end. The movie's running time is under 90 minutes, and the final scene felt to me like a cheat. To avoid spoiling it, I'll just say that it seemed to lack foreshadowing and setup the way the other scenes play out. Unless I missed some clues, it just felt like it came out of nowhere. And the way the scene plays out is just strange. Up until then, they had me. There are two alternate endings included in the special features (also fun, by the way), but they would actually truncate the film, so while they went the right way, I still think the ending could have been much more satisfying.

Back to the 3D part. I did try, after watching the whole film, to watch a couple of the scenes in 3D. At those odd moments when my eyes would cooperate, the 3D effects were pretty cool. I have to wonder if the 3D glasses in the theater were more like the ones shown in one of the scenes in the movie, more like plastic aviator glasses with green lenses. If that is the case, I need to get my butt in to see Avatar while it's still in theaters. I have a feeling that those glasses would be much easier to use.

My review, 2D Version: Recommended; 3D Version Not enough data. . .probably good for most people with normal binocular vision!

Final Destination Sunday (DVD Review)

I expected, with The Other Half away today, to get quite a bit of blogging done. But I got up late, and then I got kinda lazy. Since I rewatched Final Destination on Friday afternoon, I decided to watch Final Destination 2 and 3 today. As you can see, I'm a real aficionado of classy art pictures.

I did my duty this morning, watching most of the political shows, on DVR with a handy fast-forward button. But I wasn't inspired by anything said there. So, why not review the movies I watched today? This is my blog after all, so here we go.

Final Destination (2000) - The first film centers around a teenager who has a vision as he's boarding a plane to France with his french class. A very vivid vision, which involves a horrific chain reaction of events which leads to the plane exploding. When he snaps out of it, and details start to match his vision, he freaks out and is removed from the plane, along with several friends, and his teacher. This was before 9/11, which is a good thing, because nowadays they would probably ground the plane, and hey, no movie.

After the group disembarks, the plane does explode, but the group that escaped starts dying one-by-one in the order they would have originally died had they stayed on the plane. A theory is cobbled together, that the characters "cheated death," and that death was working to set its plan right. But death doesn't just get them by natural causes. Death constructs elaborate Rube Goldberg-ian ways to do them in.

Final Destination 2 (2003) - The second film follows a similar setup, with a girl foreseeing a horrific multi-car pileup. It departs from the usual "kill the teenagers" formula by incorporating adults who are prevented from entering the flow of traffic by the girl. And it is linked to the previous film in a very novel way.

Final Destination 3 (2006) - Part three again has a girl with a vision, this one predicting a roller coaster disaster, and preventing several friends from riding. It is only tangentially related to the other two parts, since 1 & 2 pretty much tied everything to each other.

Parts 1 - 3 work very well when watched in sequence. The hook to all of them is the elaborate ways in which the characters are killed off, and the fact that there are both foreshadowing events, as well as red herrings. For the most part, the acting is well done and believable. And the effects are pretty spectacular.

None of these films is particularly scary. In fact, because the death scenes are so wacky, it almost works as comedy. The setups (plane crash, car crash, amusement ride tragedy) are relatable. Very few of us have not imagined such a scenario happening to us when we fly, drive, or pull the safety harness down. So they are unnerving. If you have any phobias about these thing, you may actually get a jolt. But mostly, the special effects and gore are pure entertainment. If you're into that sort of thing!

Part 2 was my favorite, because of the novel way they wove the storyline together with the first. And the car crash is spectacular (as is a surprise event that happens right after). This movie had the best fake-outs, making you wonder exactly how they were going to do the characters in. And it takes risks that divert from the usual scary movie pattern.

Part 3 disappointed me the first time I watched it, because the link to the other two is tangential, and frankly unbelievable. But upon review--if you suspend disbelief on how quickly the protagonists figure out what is happening to them--it's actually not bad, and a decent entry into the series. And it takes the ultimate risk, with a surprise ending that goes totally against the horror movie rules.

If they make a Part 4--and they probably will--they will be challenged with creating a different but still relatable disaster. And they'd be smart to try to tie Part 3, or even all 3 into the storyline, to make it feel cohesive. Failing that, they need to drop all reference to "Flight 180" from the first film, and have their characters discover what's going on in a different way.

In conclusion, if you like elaborate, gory special effects, and you are tired of mindless slasher pictures, any of these films will satisfy you. And while the characters die in horrific ways, this is not Hostel or Saw-type torture-porn. Unlike Friday the 13th-type movies, you don't need nostalgia to have fun with them, and don't have to settle for "so bad, it's good." These flicks are actually well made. Just have your remote at the ready! You'll want to slo-mo something in all three movies!

Final Destination: Recommended

Final Destination 2: Highly Recommended

Final Destination 3: Recommended