Final Destination
The one with the plane crash. Not to be confused with any of The Twilight Zone initial episodes.
Wait, the airplane stuff is the setup? For a complex set of Rube Goldberg death scenes that go so over the top, it’s no longer tragic and surprising. I’m guessing that part was so popular, the rest of the films are just the greatest hits where everyone dies.
Because this has an alleged plot and everything, thin and excuse-y, but still. The mix between philosophy crap, and effects driven explicit gore is goofy enough. Since there’s not enough of a mess, there’s also the comic relief!
The plot is bare bones: some kid is going to Paris on a field trip, but has a vision of death, makes a scene and gets booted off the plane, along some people. The plane does blow up, but since their time was supposed to have come, they will die anyway, one by one. This is semi-confirmed after they break into the morgue to speak with the personification of Death, Candyman himself.
The main couple actually survives, against all odds. Every single one of the kids is a Richie Rich suburbia dweller, the girl is like the nerd from The Breakfast Club, she was going to Paris reading Tropic of Cancer.
The omen of death is country legend John Denver, I never saw a film that hated country music so much. Lebowski only hated The Eagles. The name of some characters is too on the nose, Hitchcock and Murnau? Come on!
The teacher’s death is absolutely over the top, then the protagonist manhandles the murder weapon like North by Northwest?
The love interest is called Clear Rivers, I thought it was a typo on the subtitles. She is an orphan, because her father went out to buy cigarettes and never came back, but he was murdered in the store! It verges on parody.
The only actors that did anything afterwards are Stifler from American Pie, and the woman from Heroes. They don’t even last for the whole film.
This is the producer’s wet dream, a cheapo effects driven series, without any overarching plot, meaning the talent is disposable and starts over in all instalments. No wonder this lasted so long.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.