Tongue In Shriek Fun!!!

Rating: 8/10 (31 May 2008)

Watching horror movies a lot is like landing a plane. Any landing that you survive is a good one. Any horror movie that can scare the grits out of you is good, too. Sure, you may feel embarrassed after you recover from either a false alarm or a dreadful fright, but the filmmakers managed to grip you by her fears and generate adrenalin. Now, the acid test for a genuinely good horror flick is whether the storyline is strong enough to maintain momentum during the expository lulls between the scary scenes. Director James Wong's creepy "Final Destination" qualifies as an improbable but entertaining dead teenager movie with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing until fade-out.
Airline authorities remove a mixed bag of high school seniors bound for France from their ill-fated jetliner at the last minute when 17-year old Alex Browning (Devon Sawa of "Idle Hands") has a premonition about their 747 blowing up after take-off. Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke of "Stay Tuned"), one of the teachers riding escort, agrees to behind with these reprobates while her Parisian cohort shepherds the remainder of the class across the Atlantic Ocean. While airport security guards detain them in the lounge, Flight 180 ascends into the night skies and explodes into a blazing fireball, with no survivors! Typically, any movie with a protagonist that rescues a collection of characters from certain death would win not only their undying gratitude but also their lifelong loyalty. "Final Destination" dispenses with such hackneyed histrionics. Instead, the people that Alex saved either hate his guts or have to stay away from him until their grief heals. Everybody but Clear Rivers (Ali Larter of "American Outlaws"), a Gothic-looking gal whose dad died in a convenience store robbery and whose mom lost her marbles and abandoned her, takes a shine to the ostracized Alex. She knows that Alex has a gift for predicting the future, rather like Christopher Walken did in David Cronenberg's "The Dead Zone" (1983). No matter how hard these survivors try to cheat Death in this suspenseful, nail-biting, supernatural horror chiller, the Grim Reaper reclaims them like lost luggage in the end.
Feverishly, Alex struggles to discern a pattern so that he can cheat Death and save the lives of his friends. Somewhere between its smart-aleck cynicism and its mischievous mayhem, this variation on "The Dead Zone" grapples with some high-flown philosophy. Can anybody cheat Death? Does the Grim Reaper work by some kind of design? "Final Destination" thrives on melodramatic shocks and surprises as well as several elaborately staged Rube Goldberg death traps to keep audiences on the edge of their seats. Picture "The Omen" movies cross-bred with a slasher saga, and you've got a fairly good idea what to expect from this outlandish but provocative thriller. Considering the credentials of freshman director James Wong, who co-wrote "Final Destination" with scenarist Glen Morgan, it should come as no surprise that "Final Destination" emerges as such an engrossing chiller. Wong and Morgan both worked on many of the most memorable "X-Files" episodes and it shows in "Final Destination."