Spooky Season IV is out today!

Ponty delivers up some great posts this week, giving yours portly a bit of a break during a particularly busy season.  He worked overtime (complete with overtime pay—zero times 1.5 is still zero!) to get this fun review to me in time to run in the vaunted Monday Morning Movie Review slot.

I remember seeing today’s film around the time it came out, when I was in high school (or possibly a few years later, in college; the early 2000s are a distant, warm blur to me now), and it made me really think about death, the way one does when at a funeral.  I still think about this flick every time I board a flight, especially in those first few moments after takeoff.  I breathe a tiny sigh of relief once the plane has finished its ascent.

I’ll let Ponty explain the rest.  With that, here is Ponty’s review of Final Destination (2000):

The old idiom tells us that there are two certainties in life; death and taxes. You could add to that with a whole plethora of annoyances but those are the big two. The latter is a pain but with a decent government, something which is rarer than hen’s teeth, you can hope those taxes go to good use. Improving infrastructure, health, education, defence, helping the poor and vulnerable, in your own country, not everyone before your own. That’s the wish.

Death, we tend not to think about though it inevitably creeps into your mind. More so as you start to approach middle age and if you’re in love, never your own, always someone you’re close to. When you’re young, you don’t think about it at all. When I was a kid back in the 80s, I used to climb everything – trees, building sites, that skinny gap you get between stores that are close together; back on one wall, legs on the other, pushing all the way up until you reach the top. Dangerous, I know, but I never thought about the worst. Toddlers, teenagers don’t. In Final Destination (2000) though, several teenagers are forced to face their own mortality after they cheat death only to find it hasn’t finished with them yet.

Alex (Devon Sawa) and his classmates are going to Paris on a school trip. When they get on the plane, however, Alex starts to feel that something isn’t right. As the plane takes off, it starts to shudder and rock. The overhead compartments fly open, oxygen masks drop down and the left side of the plane suddenly blows out. As students and passengers alike are blown out of the plane, fire engulfs them and the whole thing explodes in the sky. And then Alex comes to, the plane still on the runway, passengers and teenagers talking, laughing and taking their seats. Sweating and panicking, Alex leaps to the seat he was in when he’d settled in the first place and finds the drop down table is broken, just as he saw in his premonition. He yells to the crowd that the plane is going to explode which, understandably, causes a lot of panic and tension and he, a couple of teachers and a few other students are ejected from the plane. As they continue their argument in the terminal, the plane takes off and we see it through the window as it explodes in the night sky. Everyone looks at Alex in shock, horror and disbelief. Unfortunately for these lucky few, death feels like it has been cheated and as they attempt to get on with their lives, it hunts them down, one by one to enact its ghastly quota.

This is a fun movie. Dark, yes; predictable, indeed; but still fun. It might have marketed itself as a teen horror but it’s much more than that. Yes, it did produce a string of sequels to satiate the eager beaver schadenfreude audience that laps up this sort of thing but the first installment told a good story and, believe it or not, was nicely acted. Alex finds himself on the radar of the FBI who can’t believe for a second that a premonition took him off the plane and they watch him like a hawk throughout the movie. The rest of the survivors, including the teacher Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke), treat Alex like a leper, at first avoiding him through survivor’s guilt then seeking him out for help when they realise that death hasn’t finished with them yet and because Alex is still seeing death omens. Is it leftover from the vision of the plane crash? Paranoia because of that tragic event? Either way, each of them has to watch their step or join their former classmates in the afterlife.

The death scenes are great, the shadow of the reaper slipping into the vicinity of each survivor, letting out a little water here, a gust of wind there and giving us the chance to watch fate take its course. Some of them are pretty shocking – one suffers the unpleasantness of being throttled by a makeshift washing line over the bathtub – but some are quite funny. I’m not sure if the filmmakers were heading that way. Maybe it’s the sick bastard in me that found humour in it. For instance, one of the students, after telling her boyfriend that he can drop dead, gets hit by a bus. When I watched this in the cinema, there were audible gasps from the audience. I was the only one laughing! Turns out, Tina laughed at that part, too, so it’s good to know I’m not the only sicko who finds humour in the macabre. But the best was yet to come – the death of the teacher Valerie Lewton.

Now, some of the deaths you can understand. It’s easy to slip on a wet floor. It’s understandable to get distracted in the heat of the moment. But Miss Lewton was in the comfort of her own home when death comes for her. As the reaper comes through the window, common sense flies out of it as she does everything to make her own demise inevitable. I always joke, after watching this section, that death comes through the window, takes a seat at her dining table and watches her with some amusement, without having to lift a bony finger, as she blunders through every possible act to shuffle off her mortal coil and raise the IQ of her town by a good hundred. I’m not going to go into the specifics, in case you haven’t watched it, and if that is the case, stream it, buy it, rent it just for this. You’ll understand perfectly what I mean.

The young actors put in some decent performances, the FBI agents, very much chalk and cheese, are memorable despite their limited time on screen and the scream king, Tony Todd, makes a cameo as a mortician who tells Alex about the secret of mortality. The film is ably directed and has a lovely soundtrack, the opening theme especially, and its denouement sets up the story for potential follow ups, though possibly not as you or I would imagine them.

If you’re looking for a balance this Halloween, rather than something either overly serious or downright terrifying, you can’t go too wrong with this. But please, and I say this in the best possible terms, don’t do anything stupid like putting a cracked cup on top of your TV set. You’ll just be asking for trouble.