Final Destination 3: The Ghost of Murder on Ice!

Ah, FD3 – the movie in the series that I have the most contempt for (to date). Now while it’s true that most of this contempt is due to the relative lack of Tony Toddity in the film (he appears in two brief vocal cameos), it also has to do with the film’s utter failure to make any kind of sense at all. As proof, I give you – the disaster that kicks off the plot:

Wendy and friends climb aboard a devil-themed rollercoaster whose voice is provided by Tony Todd. While they’re being strapped in the hydraulic system that keeps the seat arms in place springs a bit of a leak-

Letting us know that it’s not the best-maintained ride in the state. Then an a-hole further back on the ride asks the hot girls in front of them to flash him while they’re going through the loop – although I’m not entirely clear how he thinks this could possibly happen, both because he’s an ass, and the small issue of the girls having restraints on that both limit their movement and cover their breasts.

Perhaps the line is leftover from when the script imagined they would be in a more old-fashioned rollercoaster?

Final Destination 2: The Ghost of Murder Returns

And we’re back! It’s time to take a look at Final Destination 2, which, according to Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer™, has been critically consensed to be the high point in the series, with a Freshness rating of 47%.

So you just know it’s going to be good, right?

Except no, it’s not. In fact, it sets up a disturbing trend which will continue into Final Destination 3: The Ghost of Murder On Ice!

The Final Destination series is not especially good at continuity.

Or coherent rules.

With a rented DVD of ‘Final Destination 4: The Final Destination’ sitting here by my computer, ready to be watched, I got to thinking about something that’s puzzled me for a while – no, not the way everyone but the Saw franchise seem obsessed with dropping the numbers from their titles – that’s a conversation for another time.

What I want to discuss today is just what a loose relationship the entire franchise has made with ‘making sense’. It seems like a simple enough premise to execute: There’s a visually compelling disaster in which teens are killed, which turns out to be a dream of one of the teens, which motives him/her to avoid that fate. Everyone else dies, and then the Ghost of Murder – who is pissed off at having been thwarted (And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for that meddling dream!) hunts down the survivors and kills them in an even more brutal fashion than they would have died the first time around.

Yet each film has managed to, in one way or another, botch this simple formula. Huh.

But hey, why am I talking about this in the abstract for, when I could be exhaustively detailing examples of what I mean – which is kind of the entire point of this blog, come to think of it.

So let’s start with Final Destination.

A Perfect Getaway lies to its audience

The following paragraph closes out Chapter 1, Part 1 of ‘And Then There Were None’ by Agatha Christie:

“Constance Culmington, he reflected to himself, was exactly the sort of woman who would buy an island and surround herself with mystery. Nodding his head in gentle approval of his logic, Mr. Justice Wargrave allowed his head to nod… He slept…”

Christie was an accomplished mystery writer, and she understood both the importance of leaving clues in the text for the audience to find, and how difficult it was to fool an astute reader. In single point-of-view novels, traditionally told from the POV of the detective this can be relatively simple to accomplish – since the reader doesn’t get access to any of the suspects’ thoughts, anything they say can later turn out to be a lie. It’s more of a challenge when dealing with a multiple POV narrative, when we’re let into the minds of each character, including the killer’s. How do you let the reader know what the killer is thinking without giving away their identity? Hack writers, like Tom Savage, lie, having their characters say, think, and do things they they never would simply to make them more or less suspicious, depending on the need of the story.

The Saw Diaries

In preparation for theavod’s definitive Sawcast, I kept copious notes while watching the films. I was going to toss them, but then it occurred to me, ‘hey Count, you’re trying to post things more often, right?’ And you know who’d love to read a running commentary of these movies in text form, with a few illustrations? People, that’s who!

Just a warning – the section on Saw 6 may be a little fractured. I took notes in longhand in a dark theatre, then attempted to transcribe them. Also that section doesn’t have any illustrations, for obvious reasons!

Criminal Minds 109: Derailed

Synopsis – Now it’s time for the first non-traditional episode we’ve come across. Instead of looking for an established killer over the span of a couple of days, this one is set entirely over the course of a few hours, with the team being intimately involved in the activities from the beginning. Heck, even the intro is a surprising twist on conventions.

The Blonde enters Greg’s office and enquires where New Girl has gone off to. Greg responds that she’s in Texas, on her way to giving the VICAP questionnaire to a ‘child-killer’. This is an accurate portrayal of how the Behavioural Sciences Unit actually, um, behaves. Their ability to ‘profile’ killers is dependant primarily on time they spent interviewing other killers already in prison, and putting them through a standard therapy work program. This is based on the idea that either convicted serial killers will tell the truth about their thoughts, feelings, and actions to the cops, or at least that all of them will lie in similar enough ways that the confluence of falsehoods can be somehow useful.

On the Subject of Durham County...

Having been inundated with ads for Durham County for two weeks straight about eight months ago, the delayed-reaction suggestibility part of my brain finally clicked off and I wound up renting it last weekend. I watched the six episodes back to back, and was more than a little puzzled by what I'd seen.

For the most part it's a standard enough story of a guy who loves to murder (Justin Louis), and the incredibly contrived series of interrelated coincidences that conspire to cover up for his crimes. Peep this: