Final Destination 2

Rating: 6/10 (17 June 2005)

If you thought it was over, then you were wrong, "You can't cheat death twice", pretty much exactly the same formula, where Death (The Grim Reaper) is stalking another bunch of victims, from director David R. Ellis (Cellular, Snakes on a Plane). Basically Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) has a horrific premonition of a highway pileup, with numerous victims driving killed in the incident, and believing that it will happen she stops the queue of cars getting onto the road, and the explosions and deaths indeed happen. After the survivors have left the police station, the first victim to face a bizarre death is recent lottery winner Evan Lewis (David Paetkau), when he escapes a house fire in his apartment, but he ends up slipping on some spaghetti and being impaled by the escape ladder. Police officer Thomas Burke (Michael Landes) does want to help Kimberly, so he leads her to the last survivor of Flight 180, Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) who is a voluntary inmate in a mental asylum, to isolate herself from danger. Clear does decide to leave the institute and help her find ways to cheat death, and they visit the seemingly knowledgeable mortician William Bludworth (Candyman's Tony Todd) to get answers about the death list order, as it is working backwards. Kimberly gets another vision of how the next victim will die, but they are too late to save young Tim Carpenter (James Kirk), who looks like he will die of suffocation, but he is actually crushed by a pane of glass. Eventually all the survivors of the highway crash are brought together and told about the situation, only a couple of them believe it, while Tim's mother Nora Carpenter (Lynda Boyd) walks out, and ends up being beheaded, getting her head trapped in a moving elevator. Now Kimberly, Thomas, Rory (Jonathan Cherry), Kat (Keegan Connor Tracy) and Eugene Dix (Terrence 'T.C.' Carson) are sticking together, and they have a plan to end the deaths, by making sure that fellow survivor Isabella Hudson (Justina Machado) gives birth to her baby, as "new life defeats death". Along the way there are still deaths though, as in a crashed car Kat is impaled by a sharp broken pipe when the airbag deploys, and Rory is trisected, i.e. sliced into three pieces, by an explosion sending barbed wire flying through him. Eugene goes to hospital with injuries to his chest, and the rest of the gang head for the hospital, the same one he is on, to make sure that Isabella's baby is born, and it is, and it seems it may be an end to the dying. However Kimberly has another vision where she is drowning in a white van, and at the same moment Clear and Eugene are blown up by a gas leak and spark, so Kimberly rushes to the nearest white van to plunge into the near lake to drown. They realise the "new life" was not the newborn baby, as Isabella wouldn't have died in the pileup, but it is Kimberly's revival, and she and Thomas happily enjoy a barbecue with the Gibbons, only for Death to strike one more time by exploding Brian Gibbons (Noel Fisher), with his arm landing in front of his mother. Also starring Sarah Carter as Shaina, Alejandro Rae as Dano, Shaun Sipos as Frankie and Andrew Airlie as Mr. Corman. Admittedly this isn't as clever technically as the first film, but it is really fun as you can try and guess how each victim will meet their doom, and often it isn't what you though, it also works with the irony in the dialogue, and again it is has inventive and very bloody deaths, a most worthwhile horror thriller. Good!