Teen-horror bandwagon gets another passenger [possible spoilers]

Rating: Null/10 (12 June 2000)

James Wong and Glen Morgan, the team behind TV favourites The X-Files' and Space: Above and Beyond' move into Kevin Williamson territory with this teen-horror flick. But can they beat the Scream-king at his own game? Well, no, to be honest.
A group of teenagers (who all 'ironically' have the same surnames as classic horror directors) bound for Paris leave their plane when Alex (Devon Sawa) has a disturbing vision of the plane exploding. Guess what? The plane takes off and explodes in mid-air. Death, it seems, isn't too happy at a load of irritating American kids getting away with it, and comes after them one by one, contriving increasingly bizarre and gruesome accidents for them to succumb to. Alex realises this and sets about trying to cheat death again.
This is as good a concept as any for this type of film and you can forgive Wong, who directs, the element of silliness that creeps in towards the end. But other factors are missing. None of the characters are particularly well written, with Alex and his friend Tod (Chad Donella) being the most appealing. When Tod, previously the source of the humour, buys it rather too early, the film rests on Sawa as Alex. He doesn't do a bad job, but he just isn't leading-man material, being neither attractive or funny enough to carry this sort of film. The rest of the teenagers are a hotch-potch of divorce-affected arty types, stupid jocks (Seann William Scott, Stifler from 'American Pie', is badly wasted) and rebellious macho-men, most of whom you just want to see kicking the bucket as quickly as possible.

That said, the shocks come quick and fast and some are extremely well-done and entirely unexpected. Others are over-contrived and farcical, but they all do the job  by the end of it all, you'll be paranoid about kitchen utensils and air travel will seem a very bad idea. Effective and well-made, then, but without Scream's humour or characters.