TheAvod gets Sequelitis!

That's right, it's time for three separate sequels to be covered on theAvod - here's the twist... two of them are the third entry in a series! Crazy, right? It would have been nice to get three threes in there, but sadly, it was not to be.

Anyhoo, download the episode by right-clicking here, and listen to DM and myself discuss the craziness that happens when series go on so long that they become good again!

Final Destination 4: The Final Destination

You know, when I was working on the reviews of the last three movies I gradually developed a theory that the premonitions that led people to escape their imminent deaths were being by the Ghost of Murder, solely for the purpose of his own amusement – he’s got infinite chances to kill them after all, and as only the sickest of hunters will tell you, hunting is far more pleasurable when your prey knows that they’re going to die.

It was intended as nothing more than a joke about the series’ baffling lack of an identifiable antagonist, or really any drama of any kind. Ever since the first movie it’s been a foregone conclusion that every character would die in the end – even 2’s happy ending was apparently undone in the supplemental material on part 3’s DVD, although I haven’t actually watched it to check. Tony Todd’s lines about death having a plan, and the crackpot with a book at the beginning of 2 were as close as the series ever came to giving ‘death’ a personality – the rather thin idea that ‘Death’ has a specific plan for when all living creatures were going to die, and that if you see that plan you can avoid it, at least until Death circles back around. This explanation seemed a little on the idiotic side, especially when you consider that it in no way explains the premonitions people received.

So I thought it would be funny to refer to ‘The Ghost of Murder’, a malicious spirit who arranges tragedies, then warns people about them through signs and premonitions – explaining that he was like a cat that lets a mouse go over and over just so he can catch him again and again.

Little did I know that FD4 would, whether it was intentional or not, go on to confirm my suspicions about the Ghost of Murder in their entirety. So, without any further ado, let’s take a look at Final Destination 4: The Final Destination!

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.