fireballs & tsunami

After a lovely dinner last night at Keen’s Chophouse (an establishment to which I give mad props for reliably filling my tummy with lots of steak, potatoes, wine, chocolate mousse…), we took in a screening of the new motion picture Final Destination 3.

I did enjoy the first installment of the series released in 2000, which I thought was a notch above the other lame teen horror films released around the same time. Although I haven’t seen the second installment, this didn’t deter me from wanting to check out the third, which primarily piqued my interest after hearing about its infamous roller coaster intro. As an amusement park fanatic — I’ve been known to take 10-hour road trips just to ride Cedar Point’s famous coasters — it’s always great to see coaster sequences on-screen. Especially when DANGER! is involved.

In Final Destination 3, a fatal roller coaster malfunction kicks off a series of very gory events for the teenagers who abandoned the ride at the last moment, due to the caterwaulic warnings of clairvoyant Shannon Doherty-lookalike, Wendy, who competently serves as the film’s “final girl” (more or less). As with the first film, the handful of teens who avoided the accident meet with death in various other ways in the following days.

Wendy quickly realizes that the digital photos she snapped the night of the coaster crash eerily predict the deaths of her peers, and teams up with her dead boyfriend’s best friend to warn the others about their impending deaths; warnings which practically everyone, predictably, ignores. Like a lot of horror films (specifically the Nightmare on Elm Street series), the deaths with each installment tend to become more and more over-the-top, and Final Destination 3 is no exception. We see gory deaths at a gym, a fast food drive-in window, a tricentennial fireworks celebration, a hardware store, and a tanning salon.

The tanning salon sequence, which more or less relies on gratuitous female nudity, is accompanied by the Ohio Players’ “Love Rollercoaster.” Of course, the song was utilized to complement the film’s roller coaster intro, but another interesting fact about the tune is that a woman was allegedly killed during its recording, and you can actually hear her screams buried low in the mix. While the band took a vow of silence regarding the apparent murder (a maneuver to sell more records, they claim), there are a lot of shady circumstances leading a lot of people to believe that a woman truly was murdered during recording, although the well-researched Snopes claims the story is false.

Nevertheless, since I am a good blogger, I have uploaded the “Love Rollercoaster” MP3 HERE for your listening “pleasure.” Listen around 1:25 minutes and you’ll hear the alleged scream.

See? The film had such an impact on me that I’ve digressed into musical urban legends. In any event, there are a few favorable elements in Final Destination 3. The film moves along at a reasonable pace, the two leads are more competent than many other contemporary horror film stars, the deaths are creative, and the truck decapitation is truly shocking.

However, there is more than a handful of low points in Final Destination 3. The roller coaster intro could have, and should have, been much more exciting. The editing was so fast, and the CGI so noticeable, that the could-be horror was never fully realized; not to mention, with perfunctory character development in the film’s ten minutes before the crash, none of the teens’ deaths have much impact on the viewer. The run-of-the-mill script leaves much to be desired. Lastly, while the first film has a bit of a sense of humor, this third installment takes itself more seriously than it should considering it is not, to be blunt, a great film.

While the first installment raised some interesting questions — can you avoid death? is it better to know about death in advance? — Final Destination 3 is very problematic because it quite literally functions as a checklist of who’s going to be killed next. There is no real subplot or background to establish any depth, and some of the philosophical questions confronted in the original film are wholly ignored.

In the film’s subway sequence, the two stops are “Booth” and “Oswald,” which I found very funny, but sadly the assassination references seemed to be lost on a lot of teen viewers at the theater. And, at one point in the film, a character cries out, “Ben Franklin: Fuck you!” which could be reason enough for you to see it. That character is clearly a Commie. Ben Franklin is the fucking man.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Random, Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.