I love to watch teenagers die horrible deaths. In fictional movies, not like in person or in a snuff film. It’s this love for underage maiming that got me into the “Final Destination” series. The movies can easily be broken down as follows: First one took itself way too seriously, but was original. Second one poked fun at itself, but got a little too Rube Goldberg. The third one stopped giving a shit, and the fourth one stopped giving a shit, but in 3D.

I’m not expecting an amazing film here, but is it too much to ask that the screenwriters at least attempt to extend the mythos? This is the fourth film, people. By horror movie standards it should be unrecognizable from the original, and possibly include occultism, pregnancies, and evil family members (see: every fucking horror franchise ever).

The last two films should just be edited together since it’s clear the series is just a montage of death. The characters were already pretty one dimensional, but “The Final Destination” somehow manages to remove even that dimension. One of the survivors of the initial disaster, a character who has multiple scenes, including a dedicated drawn out death scene, doesn’t even get a name. He’s listed in the credits as simply “Racist”. That’s because he calls the only black guy in the movie the N-word, then hilariously follows that up by calling said black guy “chocolate” with the same venomous snarl.

The rest of the film tries to be intentionally funny, since this is David R Ellis’ work. Unfortunately the one liners from Fratboydouchebag McGee fall flat, and any sort of tragic irony is lost since you know all of these people are going to die anyway.

The 3D at least makes the theater experience interesting. Impalements and blood spatters are cooler when it’s coming right at your face. It gets a little self reverential when the characters go to a 3D movie and shit flies at them (and us).

The movie can’t seem to decide whether Death is actively trying to murder these people (by locking doors, making pipes burst etc) or whether it’s just human error (if a construction worker puts up shoddy scaffolding, chances are shit is going to go wrong). Plus for the first time, Death decides that he doesn’t care about collateral damage, and takes out a shit ton of people with explosions, just to kill a couple kids who got lucky.

“The Final Destination” is just a terrible film, because by this point even the appeal of seeing new ways for people to die absurdly has been stretched thin. The series is stale and makes no real attempt to freshen up besides gimmicky DVD features and 3D. I shudder to think that there could be another one of these films, but on the bright side, the last two could easily be ignored since they didn’t do anything in the way of continuity. So bring on “Final Destination 5: Surprise Devon Sawa is Still Alive” and he can have a premonition about 2012 or Armageddon or something.