Final Destination 3

Harlan Ellison once wrote a semi-famous essay about wandering into a Saturday-night showing of The Omen. He left with a bleak view of humanity: it seems the late-night audience hooted and laughed at David Warner’s notorious decapitation-by-pane-glass. What Ellison didn’t get, I think, is that his fellow filmgoers weren’t applauding real death; they were responding to the elaborate clockwork contrivance of a fake demise. (It’s the same sourly amused reaction we have when reading the Darwin Awards.) The entire raison d’etre of the Omen films, and the Friday the 13th films after them, is simply this: who’s gonna get it next, and how?

Anyway, Ellison would’ve been doubly appalled at the audience’s carrying-on at a late-Friday showing of Final Destination 3, which shares the same reason for being. I enjoyed the previous entries, especially the second one, which kicked off with a truly magnificent diorama of highway catastrophe as relentless and precise as a ticking clock. Nothing in FD3 is quite so inspired, though the bit in which two topless high-school girls are trapped inside malfunctioning tanning beds has a certain cruel vigor. These movies all share a premise: a teenager has a premonition of disaster — a plane crash (part one), a car pile-up (part deux), and, here, a rollercoaster flying off the rails — and manages to save a few people. Those people have cheated death, and so death follows them throughout the movie, apparently quite pissed off, as none of the victims dies peacefully in his or her sleep.

Here, poor Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has the vision of impending doom, which isn’t enough to save her boyfriend, but does spare the lives of several obnoxious kids and another kid (Ryan Merriman) who understands what’s going on. The familiar template clicks into place: Try to convince skeptical people that they should stay away from, say, the fireworks display in the park; they ignore you; they die. Sometimes the director, James Wong, and his co-writer Glen Morgan (they initiated the series but sat out the second film) catch us leaning the wrong way: a pair of gleaming swords hanging precariously on a wall do not, as we expect, fall down and cleave someone in two; they fall harmlessly, cutting something else, and then the guy gets it.

Whoo! Man, that had to hurt! And other similar things one says at movies like this. As a parade of intricate carnage, Final Destination 3 delivers, though by now the novelty — for those with no sense of horror-film history, that is — must have played itself out. Aside from Wendy, her concerned friend, and her snarky sister, we don’t actually care whether any of the characters dies. Over-identification with the victims would only interfere with the gory schadenfreude, so the two tanning-bed victims are straight out of Mean Girls, the jock is a boastful knucklehead, the goth kid and his girlfriend are imperiously disdainful of Wendy and her mission, the horndog with the camcorder hits on everything female while referring to himself in the third person. Wendy’s conscientious fight to keep them all alive seems a mere formality, a gesture towards morality. But nobody in the audience is there to watch people avoid death.

Final Destination 2 involved people of various ages; it wasn’t only teens in peril, and each potential victim had careers, experiences, lives that were worth preserving. This one regresses the series to what Roger Ebert, back in the splatter-film ’80s, dubbed the Dead Teenager genre. So the first and third movies play something like Heathers given a morbid supernatural spin. It could be that James Wong and Glen Morgan (who had a hand in The X-Files, and remade Willard to fantastic effect a few years ago) are working off some bitterness against teens; I couldn’t say for sure. Their next collaboration will be the remake of the ’70s slasher flick Black Christmas. I suspect one way to exact delayed revenge for getting shoved into your locker a lot in high school (I’m assuming Wong and Morgan, who’ve worked on several sci-fi series, were nerds back then) is to kill off your tormentors in movies. Better that than in real life, I guess. Would that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had waited a few years and gone to Hollywood.