How did this thing spawn an entire movie franchise?

Rating: 2/10 (27 March 2012)

This is a really bad pseudo-horror film that would almost fit better into the disaster movie genre. A high school senior, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa), has a violent premonition while sitting on a plane waiting for departure for his senior class trip to Paris. He causes a commotion that gets him, several students and a teacher to be kicked off the plane. After leaving and while watching the departure, there's a disastrous mechanical failure and the plane explodes killing all aboard. The passengers who were kicked off are interviewed by the FBI, who're particularly interested in Alex because of his foreknowledge of the event and is treated as a suspect. And after all that the film goes into overdrive with this vague specter going around causing accidents that kill the survivors in grotesque (and unintentionally funny) ways. Alex learns from a creepy mortician named William Bludsworth (Tony Todd in his best Candyman face and voice) that he somehow cheated Death's design and its correcting this by doing away with the people who walked away from the plane disaster. Alex becomes determined to stop it.
Give the writer some credit for a semi-original idea in having Death itself kill a bunch of stupid teens rather than a masked psycho with butcher's tools but the execution is pure B-movie slasher and the acting is as bad as a high school play especially from Devon Sawa. The movie is gratuitous crap but somehow made enough money and is cult classic enough to have FIVE SEQUELS!