FILM REVIEW: The Final Destination

15 • 82 mins • 28 August

Director: David R Ellis

Cast: Shantel VanSanten, Bobby Campo, Nick Zano, Haley Webb

Rating:

2000’s Final Destination was a superb slasher movie hybrid whose blockbuster box office success led to two (largely mediocre) sequels. Now, less than a decade after the first flick hit cinemas, it’s been remade as The Final Destination. After replacing an airline crash with a cave-in at a formula one racing event, it pretty much repeats, ad nauseam, the original outing’s various scenes of spontaneous splatter, as Death once again ticks off the names on his list of survivors who weren’t meant to survive.

Adding insult to injury, one character even states “I have a strange feeling of déjà vu” only seconds before an identikit slaughter sequence turns him into roadkill. Oh how we laughed.

This is horror for the My Bloody Valentine 3D generation – where every single shock sequence is telegraphed about five minutes before it happens, and the cast is largely made up of scantily-clad females who appear to have jumped straight out of the pages of Playboy. Most puzzling is exactly what these Beverly Hills 90210 types actually do. After all, they all own massive houses (despite looking about 19 years old) whilst the entirety of their daily routine seems to comprise clothes shopping or lazing around swimming pools.

Exactly why we’re supposed to sympathise with these obnoxious rich kids is anyone’s guess – and it’s made all the worse by the atrocious acting on offer. You might think that seeing the grim reaper destroy each feeble thespian – in 3D, no less – would offer a guilty pleasure or two but, thanks to a series of ludicrously silly setpieces (death by swimming pool? Really?), even that opportunity is squandered.

Perhaps the worst horror movie of 2009. Let’s hope that the finality implied by that added definite article in the title doesn’t prove illusory.

Calum Waddell