Monster Scholar

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...

For those of you who remember, I was against a new Final Destination from the start, but since no one ever listens to me they went ahead and released the latest film in the FD franchise anyway. That said filmmakers did what they could considering that they were following an established formula. Enjoying a day at the racetrack with his friends, Bobby gets vision of their fiery and violent deaths caused by cataclysmic crash. Interestingly enough, this latest film follows the formula of the original more closely than any other. Bobby experiences his vision and while trying to get his friends out, causes a fight which gets his buddies as well as a larger group of people thrown out of the arena. He saves their lives but death starts coming for them one by one. The extra people who get thrown out are used by the film as “death padding,” so we can enjoy their gruesome ends before we get close to the core group of friends--the same formula at work in the first film when Devon Sawa’s frea...

The answer is no. I watched the first Final Destination when I was in my teens, when the idea of death stalking survivors of a disaster was fresh and innovative for its time. But through two sequels the concept of death coming after clueless teenagers has been done to death, and has become an excuse to stage ridiculously elaborate death sequences (the plate glass death caused by pigeons in FD2 and tanning bed from FD3 come to mind). Even though it inspired two more films, the first Final Destination ultimately falls short as a horror film. In the beginning the film has a lot of promise as it starts to play with ideas of post traumatic stress and teenagers thinking they are indestructible, but it never develops any of these concepts past the introduction stage. Instead as the film progresses it drops all pretense of actually saying something meaningful and collapses under the weight if its own ridiculousness (Devon Sawa thinking he was going to die of tetanus from a rusty fishing h...

To commemorate the release of The Final Destination in theaters this summer, here are my favorite deaths from the Final Destination series. Terry Chaney gets hit by a bus after telling her boyfriend Carter to “drop dead” Ms. Valerie Lewton can’t seem to catch a break and dies when her computer shoots a glass shard into her throat, her kitchen catches fire and she is skewered by a knife while reaching for a dish rag. A piece of metal shrapnel propelled by a passing train slices Billy Hitchcock’s head in half while he’s yelling at Carter that he’ll be the next to die. Lucky lottery winner Evan Lewis narrowly escapes being blown up by his microwave, but he eventually gets his due after slipping on a pile of discarded spaghetti in an alley and is jabbed in the eye by the fire escape ladder. Rory the drug addict serves as comic relief until he is diced by a pair of flying logs connected by barbed wire. The anonymous farmer’s son is saved from death when Rory pulls him out of the way of an ...