Better than average, that's about it: 6/10

Rating: 6/10 (3 February 2003)

The downfall of this movie begins when two of the teenagers break into a morgue to visit the corpse of a dead friend. They are met there by a really bad plot device in the guise of a mortician. Morticians are expected to have coarsened sensibilities due to working alongside death every day and maybe a little eccentric as well, but this one is way over the top. Of course, he's not there as a real character but rather as a means to give away the plot along with any lingering mystery still contained in the movie. How he knows what he knows we dare not ask, we're just supposed to accept that someone who deals with corpses on a regular basis has a deep metaphysical insight into how death operates. Not only that, he also knows the precise predicament that the teenagers are in even though he's never met them. His only real function is to trim some time from the movie's length so that the real characters don't have to expend any excess energy discovering what they're up against. I guess the other thing I didn't like about the movie was the "teenage twist" factor contained in the movie's ending. You know how it goes: the supernatural or fate, in this case, must play by certain rules so that the movie will seem more like a game to the target audience, mainly teenagers. But rules are kind of constraining and predictable, even to teenagers, so the movie sets up a false ending that's not really the ending because there's one more act to the game before it's over. Most recently the movie "The Ring" did this false ending along with countless others before it.
To be honest, the movie overall is inferior to a decent X-Files episode. For example, the FBI agents just do not command respect; somehow they lack the deadly seriousness portrayed so well in that series. The victims in the movie are dispatched in particularly gruesome ways and although some are very effective in jolting the viewer it does give one the feeling you're watching a teen slasher movie with an invisible diabolical John Denver working in place of Freddy or Jason. I'm really kind of disappointed that Morgan and Wong didn't do a better job given their extensive background with the X-Files.