A Co-Op Critics Review!
Player 1: OnePumpedNinja
With a self-contradicting title like Final Destination 3, there is little more to expect than what you expect to expect from the expectations of the previous films. It’s the same old tale with fresh new faces to get smoked in the most morbidly creative ways imagineable on film.
It is the same plot as before: a group of high-school teenagers celebrate their seniority at an amusement park and something goes terribly wrong with the roller coaster. The yearbook photographer Wendy (Mary Winstead) and a couple of students escape death thanks to a premonition of things to come. As before, the Grim Reaper is seriously pissed that those pesky teens escaped his ingenius death trap and hunts the survivors down in the order of departure that they were supposed to be in.
I am assuming that you have seen this film (or are going to see it) because you like horror and not because some jerk boyfriend or freaky girlfriend is going to drag you to see it. In that case, we can forget the question of “is it scary?” and head to the meat of the film: the deaths. The appeal of watching any of the links in the Final Destination chain is that the setup for each cannon fodder teen’s demise is an elaborate, dark contraption reminiscent of some diabolical version of the board game “Mouse Trap.” The more creative, the better. Not that I am advocating torture and death as acceptable (though the killing off of two bimbettes in tanning beds is grimly funny), but in the context of these films it is obviously intended to be dark humor. Final Destination 1 had its plane crash and Final Destination 2 had its interstate pile-up. Here, we have a haywire roller coaster and yes, people get flung off. There’s a guy who dies by weight lifting and those tanning bed chicks I mentioned awhile ago. Need I continue? It gets mind-numbingly entertaining when you consider the fact that these kids know that the Grim Reaper is after them and still place themselves in stupid situations like operating a nail gun and skill saw. The film is as entertaining as a dumb kid who touches the stove even when his mom tells him not to.
If you’ve seen the first two, you will not be disappointed. If you’re new to all this, you’ll either be terribly offended or guiltfully amused.
Final Destination 3: Not as fresh as Saw, but more entertaining than Hostel.
Player 2: DrSpengler
If there is any horror franchise that could conceivably continue onward into the distant future, it is Final Destination. The concept is fresh, unchallenged by knock-offs (so far, anyway) and so long as the sequels fulfill the requirements of the franchise, you’re guaranteed an intensely entertaining horror film. Maybe nothing that will ever escalate to “classic”-status, but something fun, gory, surprising, intriguing and satisfying all the way around.
The concept of the Final Destination franchise is constant through-out all the films; a group of people survive a horrible demise because one of the would-be corpses foresees the event, freaks out, and accidentally saves them all. However, you can’t cheat death no matter how hard you try, and one-by-one the survivors perish in gruesome, ironic “accidents” in the exact order in which they would have died earlier. And in the case of Final Destination 3, a group of annoying teenagers survive a nightmarish rollercoaster fiasco only to fall prey to Death-itself shortly afterward.
The concept is interesting enough, but that’s not what makes these movies so entertaining. It’s the WAY these people die that either shocks the crap out of you or leaves you in stitches. The deaths rely on a series of coincidences to cause more coincidences which eventually end with the designated teenager meeting a spectacularly painful demise. The coincidences build-up and build-up, for minutes at a time, leaving you hooked to see how one affects the other. The only comparison that can be made is to a Rube Goldberg Device. You know, like when a bowling ball falls onto a scale, the scale tips and the elevating tray taps the tail of one of those drinking toy birds, the bird dips into a bowl of water, the ripple causes a tiny toy sailboat to float to the end of the bowl and bump into a piece of cheese that was sitting on the table, the cheese falls to the floor where it intrigues a mouse, the mouse goes to the cheese but also has rabies and bites you in the leg on its way toward the cheese. Then on your way to the doctor you get hit by a semi.
Something like that only way cooler with ten times the gore and violence.
And Final Destination 3 provides lots of gore. I don’t want to ruin too much for you, but the brutality of the deaths surpass those in the first two films. Particularly what happens to the roid-raging black dude. In your FACE!
As far as a grade is concerned, on The Relative Grading Scale of Inappropriate Cartoon Snowmen, a BAD grade would be…ohhh…”Slushy the Slush-Packer”. However, since this was a GOOD movie, it rates a “Frosty the Pedophile”.
So if you want to see a horror movie that fits all the criteria to be entertaining, but isn’t anything that’ll make the history books, then check this movie out. It’s original (or as original as a sequel can get), gory and very fun to watch.