Final Destination: Fifth Time's a Charm

Promotional artwork and a US trailer have been released for Final Destination Five and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a teensy bit excited. The number one cause of my glee is the slammin’ promotional artwork. All silver and black, a dangerously sharp number five knifes its way through a human skull. Metal meets horror in this killer image. Second is the appearance of Tony Todd aka the Candyman as Bludworth the mortician now coroner who appears to explain death’s master plan. Todd plays the same character in the original Final Destination, but now it looks like he’s out of the funeral parlor and on the streets describing the carnage like the narrator from Faces of Death.

The teaser deaths provided by the trailer are all notably cringe-worthy. Anything having to do with eyes and eye trauma has bothered me since I was forced to watch Opera and the opening scene is of a young woman on an operating table awaiting laser eye surgery. This seems like a bad time for her doctor to leave the room looking for her chart and a good time for death to swoop in and sizzle her baby blues right out of her sockets with an out of control laser. A little more ridiculous is the death by acupuncture needles as a half-naked guy takes a tumble off his massage table. The setup feels comic, but I still flinched.

Warner Brothers is not giving up much on this latest film in the FD franchise. They released the following synopsis: Death is just as omnipresent as ever and is unleashed after one man's premonition saves a group of coworkers from a terrifying suspension bridge collapse. But these unsuspecting souls were never supposed to survive, and, in a terrifying race against time, the ill-fated group frantically tries to discover a way to escape Death's sinister agenda. It’s the same modus operandi as the previous Final Destination films, but the trailer reveals an interesting twist when one character says that to survive it’s “kill or be killed” It seems that survivors will not only have to worry about death picking them off, but also the threat from their fellow survivors who might off them to ensure their own lives are safe.

The cast is a bevy of fresh faces including Emma Bell of The Walking Death and Nick D’Agosto of Heroes, along with Miles Fisher who played a coke dealer on the controversial Gossip Girl.It seems that FD5’s strategy is to provide fresh meat for the grinder that is the Hollywood machine in the hopes that some new blood can resurrect this ailing franchise.