Just go there already!

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2014)

My prerequisite for a horror movie is pretty simple: Did it scare me?. Most horror movies don't reach that goal but 'Final Destination' contains three scenes that had me gripping the armrests of my chair.
The plot revolves around a high school kid named Alex (Devon Sawa) who is about to head off to Paris with his senior class. He has a vision that the plane is about to go down in flames. This leads to the first of the scary scenes. The side of the plane explodes with some of the passengers screaming as their seats get sucked out into the night sky and the flames burn everyone else alive.
He awakes to find that it was a dream and begins screaming that he has to get off. Well, a handful of them are spared and as they stand in the airport lobby arguing the plane explodes in mid-air. The way that shot is handled is ingenious: We see a wideshot of the window inside the airport with the actors at the bottom of the screen arguing and the explosion happens in the top left corner of the screen. This is one of the most effectively scary plane crashes that I have seen in a movie.
After the death of one of the survivors Alex begins to sense that there is a pattern. An undertaker (played over-the-top by Tony Todd) informs him that there is in fact a pattern that death takes. Now Alex can figure out how the rest of the survivors are going to die. Preventing their deaths isn't going to be so easy since the FBI is breathing down his neck and every time he fails to save someone, it looks like he did it.
The plot as you may have surmised is completely stupid. We see what will happen a mile away and some of Alex's reactions are completely out of context (If you had just seen someone decapitated, would you start yelling about your theory of death?).
What works are the scary moments. The plane crash is the scariest part of the movie and there is knuckle-biting scene involving a car stalled on the railroad tracks that had most moviegoers peering through their fingers. But for me, there is a moment that was a complete shock, a moment when a character is casually talking and dies as suddenly as a light going off. Those moments make the movie worth seeing. 'Final Destination' isn't a great film but it met my scare quotient. This is workable junk food cinema from a genre that is usually as bland as a junk food wrapper.