Final Destination: Brainless Formula at its Very Best

Yesterday’s rant about Rob Zombie aside, there are times when I can really enjoy a good, gory horror movie, and the Final Destination films are some of my favorites when it comes to mindless, gratuitous gory death. In fact, when it comes to Final Destination, we’re looking at gory death with a side of gory death, sprinkled with some gory death: it’s literally all the movies do. But for some reason they do it well.

Aside from the first Final Destination, these movies are anything but original. In fact, I can’t think of a movie franchise more rooted in formulaic story that Final Destination (unless, of course, James Cameron decides to make Avatar a multiple film endeavor). Your basic Final Destination plot goes exactly like this:

Main character and friends find themselves in a large group setting where a tragic and complex disaster occurs (respectively, a plane exploding, a freeway pile-up, a roller coaster accident and, in the newest film, a speedway collision). Several key characters are seen to die horribly in whatever this disaster is. The first disaster scene is always a vision seen by the Main Character, who then causes a commotion that pulls these key characters out of harm’s way just before the real disaster occurs. The rest of the movie consists of these characters being chased down by Death and being killed in rather complex, gruesome manners, in the exact order they would have died if they had not been saved from the disaster in the first place. Main Character and Love Interest decide that preventing Death from taking whichever victim is next in the chain should theoretically stop the progression of gory death altogether (because, you know, stopping Death from claiming all these lives in the first place worked so well). They inevitably save the person they believe is “next” to die, only to have a vision at the last minute showing them that whoopsie, they were wrong, and the next person to die is already in imminent danger. The story wraps up when they once again believe they have managed to stop Death’s rampage, only to have one final sequence at the end of the movie prove they haven’t stopped or changed anything at all, as another complex and tragic disaster strikes (presumably killing all the last survivors) right before the credits roll.

At least Final Destination 1 and 2 introduced and then attempted to put a new spin on this formula: in the sequel they discover all the key survivors are actually linked to the previous film’s survivors, having been saved from Death once before by events put into motion when Death instead took a detour to claim the folks he missed the first time around. But by the time viewers got to Final Destination 3, the film’s producers had caught on to the fact that no one was going to these movies to see any mystery solved: they were going to watch people crushed by falling planes of glass, tri-sected by whipsawing lengths of barbed-wire, decapitated by elevator doors and impaled by vehicle airbags blasting their heads backwards into the sharp, broken off edges of pipe jutting through the back of their driver’s seats.

Final Destination movies are all about who can come up with the most complex, over-the-top way to die. And they do a pretty good job of it! Of course, as the franchise has gone on, the deaths have become more and more unbelievable, to the point where, finally, in Final Destination 4, I’m not sure even a single death scene is even remotely possible. They rely on “worst-case scenario” logistics—what happens when a wobbly ceiling fan is coming loose from its joints right above a faulty stylist’s chair where one of our survivors is having her hair cut, and the condensation from the cup of water she’s requested makes the stylist’s table so slick that the hair-spray can slips into the waiting plates of a hot straightening iron? (The answer is: the hairspray can heats up to the point where the contents under pressure burst, turning it into a projectile that launches up into the air, hitting the ceiling fan and jarring it finally loose, so it crashes down to the floor right in front of the stylist chair, frightening the beautician holding a sharp pair of scissors right by the survivor’s eye, causing the chair to drop suddenly and nearly jabbing the scissors right into the survivor’s brain).

It’s all about building a better mousetrap. And after all that, of course, it isn’t even the exploding hair spray or the faulty chair or the falling ceiling fan or the scissors hovering just near the survivor’s eye that actually delivers the final death blow: no, just when you think our survivor has once again slipped out of the jaws of the Reaper, she steps out the door of the hair salon right when a riding mower across the street kicks up a pebble at such mind-boggling speed that it shoots right through her skull like a bullet.

Yep. That’s Final Destination for you. Completely random, often illogical scenes of gory suspense served up with a side of gory death. And there’s no escape. Ever. The survivors are never going to find that magic formula to outwit Death. They’re never going to live through the film and go on to the happy ending they actually deserve. Final Destination is about waiting to see when and where that final axe will fall.

Final Destination 4 measured up to its predecessors fairly well, to be honest. I say “fairly well” because as far as a formulaic horror film with a storyline laid out in black and white from before the opening credits are even through, it was entertaining. Ridiculous, yes, but entertaining. I think that my overly-analytic side has become so morbidly interested with the complexities of Final Destination death scenarios that the franchise has become more like black comedy to me than a serious attempt at grim horror. I truly enjoyed watching the fourth installment but that is because analyzing the impossible comedies of error that result in these better mousetraps of gory death is incredibly funny to me.

Here’s an example of implausible death for you: man struck by speeding ambulance explodes like an over-filled balloon. I mean, okay, sure… you get hit by an ambulance going that fast, chances are you’re not going to survive it… but the human body doesn’t just explode like a balloon from that force of impact! Break about a hundred bones, maybe. Go sailing through the air, probably. Die immediately, sure, I’ll buy that. But… exploding? Splattering like a blood-and-guts piñata? Yeah, no. Not unless the ambulance is speeding by at the speed of sound.

But that’s Final Destination for you: if it isn’t over-the-top gory and a little bit ridiculous, it just isn’t good enough.