As a movie reviewer, my greatest fear is that I will be right a little too frequently, and that my ego will become so large that it starts eating itself. Horror movies, plagues which I avoid with about as much success as the pharaoh from Exodus, are the bane of this concern, an unstoppable march of movies that are just plain terrible, without caveat or addendum. Year in and out they flow into my local MISSION VALLEY CINEMA (There, I plugged, now comp my tickets!) like the wretched excess bile of some foul, multi-million dollar killbeast, heart obsidian black, whose very carapace is forged from the deepest wells of hate found only in The Hate Wells at the darkest margins of known space.
Wait, what?
Anyway I am remiss to inform you that The Final Destination did neither "suck" nor "blow," things I never could get my last girlfriend to learn (ba-dum-tish!), and was in fact a rizocking awesome good time. A few notes, though. This is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, it is a bad, woefully predictable cheap scare gore festival extravaganza with about as much self-respect as your average porno and regretfully fewer money shots.
I mean...err...who wants to go to church with me on Sunday and feel chaste?!
So why is it a good time? Weirdly, I felt transported back to 18 months ago when I saw Horton Hears A Who, though the only real similarity these two share is that they were written by someone for whom the words "hallucinogen" and "maniac" held biographical significance. Horton wasn't a great movie. It's at best a movie you would give to people that you never know what to buy for, hoping and praying that it doesn't engender the kind of passive-aggression that leads to flung turkeys on Family Attack Day.
Thanksgiving. Right. Always get those mixed up.
But, like me, you may have seen Horton on one of those days where something sweet and silly was necessary medication for a day described with perhaps far less friendly adjectives. A place of cats with hats, of processions of colored, numerical fish. A place of peace, whimsy.
Conversely, The Final Destination is good on a bad day because you get to watch people die! Come on, in these harsh economic times, isn't it comforting to know that people with only slightly more money than man servants, the film's main characters, are out there dying by the Lamborghini-load? Yes, no panacea is quite so fulfilling as one peopled by upper class, bored white kids with an obvious disrespect for Satan's plan to maim each and every one of their pretty, hair geled heads.
For those that have not previously experienced the Destination that is increasingly inaccurately described as "Final," this is the fourth in a time-honored heritage of films that involve a bunch of hormonal teenagers who have the audacity to keep on sucking up air even after plane crashes, highway pile-ups and rogue rollercoasters. Gosh, I wish I could afford the kind of high-priced skin care products that make them so impervious to the machinations of Fate.
This forces Satan to rise out of his bone throne, made from Nazis, Visigoths and other peoples now collectively referred to as German, shoo away Mussolini from his mani and Pol Pot from his pedi and waggle his big, be-infernocioused finger at what is basically the cast of One Tree Hill and say "Oh you did-nt," head bobbing evilly. Mayhem, shortly, ensues.
What's old is new again, though, when you stop numbering your movies and start putting definite articles in front of them, and The El Finale Destination-o goes one progressive step further and makes this murderfest center around an ancient and cherished red state tradition: NASCAR. Finally, a horror movie for the Bible Belt!
You may have noticed that this particular NASCARsaster is available in THREEEEEEDEEEEEE, WHEEEEEE! But trust old man Morgster, you can save yourself the extra $3.50 and have an even better time watching all the cheap special effects that were designed to jump out of the screen, but instead fall flat on their miserable, bidimensional faces. TFD has an odd sense of self-deprecating humor, and lines like "I'm gonna enjoy these last precious moments and do what I do best: get laid!" and "That's a lot of tampons for one woman!" come out like a left field slap across the face as your legs pinwheel from gigglegasms. There's even a scene later in the movie where it attempts to kill you, the audience, and there's so much meta-scorn floating around that by the time my doppelganger's parts start decorating the theater walls all I can do is smile.
And as promised there's a great sense of class war revenge, as you won't like your teeny bopper heroes and heroines as they: play golf, have no jobs, their hair and clothes' level of trendyness increases exponentially with each scene, their cars are referred to as "custom pieces of sh*t," these same cars they decide to have completely washed after one drop of bird poo and then they decide to fly away to Paris at the drop of a hat. Whereas between my bank account and my wallet I can buy, let's see, a sandwich.
Oh how I hate thee, you GAP billboard rejects.
The thing is, even when you shave off an entire dimension on the ticket price, the movie is annoyingly short at around an hour and fifteen minutes, but hey, it has Mykelti "BubbaGumpShrimp" Williamson in it playing a stadium security guard that wears a pink bathrobe, reads Alcoholics Anonymous, makes cookies and occasionally tries to hang himself, and who are you to argue with such an Oscar-caliber performance?
Ultimately, this boils down to whether or not you have a problem rooting for the big, red horned one, and you know you don't, not really. Because someday he'll go after people you don't like and, if you're really bad and listen to lots of pop music and run over lots of turtles, he'll do the coup de grace with a player piano and a blowtorch. And you'll wanna see that, just as sure as you want to see this movie.
2.5/5 stars
Morgan McCormick is the co-host of MovieChatter. Click here to listen to an even more detailed discussion of The Final Destination.
