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Final
Destination
(1999) |
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As the plane carrying 40 American students to Paris for a field trip is about to take off, Alex, one of the students has a terrifying premonition - he sees the plane explode in mid air. Panic ensues and Alex and 6 others (5 students and a teacher) are ejected from the flight before take off. Sure enough - as they sit dejected in the departure lounge waiting for a later flight their friends are blown out of the sky. But Death is not to be cheated so easily. Having been robbed of the 6 'marked' people, the Grim Reaper sets about reclaiming the lives that were his. One by one an unseen force begins to kill the survivors.
Only Alex who continues to have premonitions of the killings may be able to outwit death and if he can the remaining survivors will be spared - for the time being at least! I almost missed Final Destination, put off by its timid 15 rating and the thought of yet another teen horror movie. However, right from the start this film is taut, tense and scary. There are some wonderfully edge of the seat scenes as well as two or three genuine shocks. The atmosphere throughout is uneasy and some of the killings are surprisingly nasty remembering also that the film was given a 15 certificate. Despite being consistently scary the film also manages to introduce a degree of wit to the script. However, unlike the Scream series, the wit is sparingly used and doesn't detract from the films horror content. Final Destination is also helped immeasurably by having an unseen evil as the focal 'villain' rather than depending on the atypical crazed killers, monsters from Hell etc. For me, Final Destination is the scariest horror film to have hit the screens for many years. Blair Witch was innovative, Scream defined a genre but Final Destination is old fashioned in its approach to being scary. A pleasure to watch a straight up horror film that chills the blood.
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