Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Wendy Christensen), Ryan Merriman (Kevin Fischer), Amanda Crew (Julie Christensen)

Written by: Glen Morgan and James Wong
Directed by: James Wong

Review by Steven Snyder

Partly a macabre homage to Rube Goldberg, and partly a gory Sherlock Holmes spoof, this third installment of the Final Destination franchise is the most disgusting, and viscerally enjoyable movie blood-bath in years.

In this era of safe, eerily predictable formulas, here’s a giddy, ghastly horror film that upends all our expectations. To call this a guilty pleasure is to take the teeth out of the word guilty – I’m horrified that I liked this film, but there’s really no way around the truth that the further director James Wong pushes the envelope, the more hilariously offensive, and enjoyable, this death ride becomes.

Some movies are so bad they’re good. This movie is so profoundly awful that it’s delirious. A third of the movie spent with eyebrows raised, confused how it ever got made; another third is spent squirming; and another third is spent laughing hysterically, wondering just how much money these guys got to blow on this inside joke.

A quick search yields the estimate of $25 million. Not too shabby. 

The premise of the entire series has surrounded death and the notion of fate: What if someone was meant to die in a disaster, but survived?

The first film involved an airplane crash. The second – the best of the trilogy – dealt with a car crash. And standing apart from these two – which seem based somewhere in the horrors of the real world – is the premise of the third: A roller-coaster crash.

    

And not far in, we realize that Wong, along with screenwriter Glen Morgan, both the writers of the first Final Destination, get it too. Never has a carnival looked more menacing, with the evil, eerie music, the floating camera, and the careful zoom in on the carousel – scream! – or the mechanical fortune teller – the horror!

This chapter, like all Final Destination films, has three components. The first is the tragedy itself, which plays out on this roller-coaster-from-hell to stunning effect. It is loud, fast, fiery and genuinely scary. Then there is the post-tragedy mourning of the half-dozen students who got off the coaster just in time.

Finally, there’s the supernatural detective story. With an absurd bit of logic, Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the girl who initially predicted the coaster’s demise, and Kevin (Ryan Merriman), her friend’s boyfriend who got off the ride with her, start to realize the survivors are going to be picked off, one by one. And the only clues they have are to be found in Wendy’s carnival pictures from that evening, each picture containing a clue, like a streak of light or a knife in the background.

And as they rush to their friends, warning them of the impending doom and systematically trying to figure out how they will be killed, Final Destination 3 feels like a Rube Goldberg machine and Sherlock Holmes novel all in one. They race to a weight room to warn the football player, and start piecing it together: The spilled water on the floor, the heavy weights hanging all around, the decorative swords hanging above, the stuffed bear with pointy teeth, etc. Just like an elaborate Rube Goldberg experiment, we see how a series of 10-20 elements lead to a jaw-droppingly revolting death.

Sure it’s absurd, though not as absurd as the tanning bed sequence. And it creates an odd set of logic, where we are not just being shocked by death but are actively analyzing what form the impending murder will take, until before Wong – surely much to his delight – tosses all logic aside, throws in yet another element, and crushes his character’s heads in bloody explosions. It becomes a game, and to Wong’s credit, he outthinks us each time.

This is in no way, shape or form a good movie. But it’s a fun movie in an absurd, excessive, no-they-didn’t kind of way – just like Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2, where a zombie cuts herself in half with her own chainsaw. It sucks you in as an investigator only to shock you into revulsion, but it does so with such unmitigated gall and creativity, in a gross-out film kind of way, that it’s clear some sort of intelligence is working behind the curtain – however perverted that intelligence might be.

 No doubt Wong and Morgan laughed deliriously through this whole thing.  

Rating: 3 stars out of 4