[DrSpengler]

Here's the review I wrote for www.filmsy.com

Final Destination 3


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.