FINAL DESTINATION 3 (which I will now abbreviate as FD3) is a continuation of what may be a hardy franchise in teen screamers. Within that genre (and I emphasize that qualifier) it a good flick.

In case you dodged the two previous FD movies, I will recap: In the original 2000 movie, a NY highschool class is starting the class trip to Paris. One of the kids, just as he's buckling his seat belt, has a vision of the plane exploding in mid-air. He becomes hysterical and is forcibly taken off the plane and about half a dozen of his classmates are concerned enough to follow him out. And the plane blows up. And then the kids who got off the plane are killed in fantastic and improbable accidents in the order in which they would have been killed if they had stayed on the plane (although it may seem illogical to speak of a sequence in such a disaster).

In the 2003 sequel, a motorist about to merge with traffic on the Interstate (also in NY) has a sudden vision of a truck accident causing an enormous chain collision. She stops her car on the merge ramp, blocking about half a dozen cars behind her. Lo and behold, within a minute there's the truck and the chain of fatal collisions but this driver and all the people behind her are safe .... until they start dying in convoluted accidents in the order ...

And here we are with the 2006 FD3. It's just a couple of weeks before graduation day at McKinley (Penn.) High School and the school has arranged a class day at the amusement park. A bunch of kids climb into the loop-the-loop roller coaster, but just as it's about to start, the girl in the back seat has this vision of an elaborate series of mishaps causing the roller coaster restraints to suddenly unlock when it's upsidedown, with people being flung off, until the coaster jumps the track with this girl the only surviving passenger. She becomes hysterical and a sort of fight breaks out among a bunch of the classmates over whether she's spoiling the fun, so she's pulled off the ride and so are her squabbling classmaters and then the ride begins .... and ends very abruptly about 30 seconds later.

So we have this girl and about a half dozen other teens who survived this ride only because they got off it just before the carriages started. And then, one by one, ....

So what distinguishes this Final Destination from the first two? Mostly nothing except the hideous and farfetched accidents that kill off the kids. One gimmick added for this third movie is that not only are the kids killed off in the order they would presumably have died on the roller coaster but also a premonition of each kid's death is contained in photos taken before that roller coaster ride. The special effects are rather good and the freak accidents are imaginative (although I suspect some of them seem possible only if you don't know how some machines work). This time we get to see two Valley Girl types - naked - get toasted to death on tanning tables. For some people out there, that alone is worth the price of admission (in the network version, they keep their bikinis on, because "guys get off on tanlines").

The entire cast is unknown teens and the acting quality is marginal (reportedly the casting wasn't done until just a few days before filming commenced), but that's not what people come to see in this movie. In fact, there's hardly one character in this movie who's supposed to be drinking age. Apparently this is the formula for the franchise -- unknown teen actors and highly imaginative causes of death. A link to the previous two movies in the franchise - Tony Todd, who played a weirded-out morgue technician in the first two flicks (and played Candyman in that three flick horror franchise), provides the voice for the roller coaster's loud speaker system and for the subway system in an unnamed city where the stations have names associated with famous assassinations.

Once again, not for acting, nor for dialog nor logic, but only for the special effects and imaginative and gory deaths. Keep that in mind and you won't be disappointed.

With this franchise basing its disasters on an airplane explosion, a multi-car wreck, and a roller coaster, in each of the three movies so far, I suppose there will be more stories -- maybe arising from disasters in an elevator, a ferry boat, and .... well my imagination has dried up, but they'll of something.*


PS: In late July 2006, about four months after the movie left the theatres, a special 2-disk DVD version was issued. The second disk has the usual featurettes plus something that only works in a computer with internet. The first disk has the original movie, plus a really special feature: a version in which the viewer (armed with only the remote control) can choose which way the plot goes at about 6 points in the movie. The first opportunity comes early on when the kids toss a coin to decide whether to ride the doomed rollercoaster. If you change the course of events you get a very short feature; the kids leave the park as the rollercoaster (carrying strangers) crashes, then an Animal House-type epilog with the life outcome of each of the "rescued" kids (none of them had a particularly happy life after the amusement park) and cut to the closing credits. Going back to the movie, you will find that choosing the variants usually results in the same person dying anyway but slightly differently. These opportunities to change the story usually come shortly after the beginning of a scene. There's even a variant that tells us that the survivors of FD2 didn't last very long.

Evidently these variants for the DVD were planned in advance of the movie, with special scenes being shot for that purpose. The amusement park, by the way, is in Vancouver, Canada, and its rollercoaster is called The Corkscrew.
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* Additional PS (Oct. 2008): I was right about additional movies in this franchise. The fourth installment (simply called THE FINAL DESTINATION and done in 3-D)  is scheduled for release in August 2009 -- and involves one of those hideous race car spinouts. And I'm betting that's not the end of the franchise.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older