Boy, it's been a while since I've seen a horror movie at the Davis. It's about time, I reckon.

Final Destination is a somewhat spooky film in which a teenager gets a premonition of a crash while sitting in a plane bound for France, causing he, a teacher and several other classmates to leave the plane and "cheat death" as the plane does indeed crash soon after it takes off. The rest of the film consists of the survivors getting picked off one by one in freak accidents.

I liked the premise of the film overall, that it was somehow unnatural for them to survive, and that they were dying perhaps to restore the natural order of things. The film did a good job on some of the death scenes, each of them arising from the culmination of seemingly random events. The teacher's death was quite complex, kinda reminded me of a Rube Goldberg invention.

The film had some good bits of suspense, the best parts occurring when it focused on something mundane happening that you knew would somehow be a factor in one of the accidents, but you weren't sure exactly how. Probably the tensest part of the film was following some water leak from a toilet pipe, slowly seeping across a bathroom floor.

However, this bathroom scene ended in a crappy way, in some ways compromising the premise of the film. The water causes a character to get killed, but then after the character dies, the water recedes and seeps under the toilet, leaving no trace. It gives the appearance of a consciousness at work - the water didn't want to get caught, so to speak. I thought this was kinda lame because my favorite idea of the film was that none of the deaths could be proven to be planned or malevolent, they all had a sense of randomness.

There were other cheesy moments in the film. There were some clunky references to B-movies - the teacher's name was Val Lewton, and there were probably other horror-movie names that I just missed. Halfway through the film, the premise of the film is unnecessarily spelled out to us by a mortician played by the Candyman himself, Tony Todd. The ending was kinda sucky, but I won't reveal it because I respect you so much.

I know I'm whining about the film. It's what I do! It wasn't a great movie, but it was a nice idea that was executed relatively well.

See you at the movies. Save me the unstained seat.