March 16–23, 2000

movie shorts

Final Destination

Slasher films are, admittedly, an acquired taste, but if you can appreciate the genre’s conventions, social commentaries, ironies and gruesome antics, Final Destination delivers on all counts, with clever, cheesy, crazy abandon. Directed by James Wong (TV’s The X-Files), and based on a story by diehard Elm Street fan Jeffrey Reddick (reworked by Wong and his X-Files and The Others co-producer Glen Morgan), the film follows the guilt, fear and madness shaping the lives of several high students who get off a Paris-bound plane — due to a portentous vision and ensuing hysteria from Alex Browning (Idle Hands’ Devon Sawa, whose character name invokes Freaks director Tod Browning) — and then see the thing blow up just after takeoff. Sawa and his sullen sidekick/romantic interest Clear (Ali Larter) soon learn that death has a "design," as intoned by the chatty local mortician (Candyman Tony Todd, who should know). The rest of the film involves the kids (Kerr Smith, Chad Donella, Amanda Detmer, American Pie’s Seann William Scott) and their teacher (played by The Others’ Kristen Cloke and named Val Lewton, like the famous horror filmmaker) trying to "cheat" death, which keeps coming at them in unbelievably horrible and imaginative ways. It’s a slasher movie with smart use of forced perspectives, laughably unspooky wind and lightning effects and no slasher.

—Cindy Fuchs