With Final Destination: Bloodlines coming out this summer, I have decided to take a trip down memory lane and re-watch the entire franchise of you-can’t-cheat-Death-because-he-will-come-for-you-but-also-play-with-his-food-by-making-your-death-an-elaborate-Rube-Goldberg-device-of-death horror flicks. It is an odd franchise. The films were always mildly profitable and regularly found airplay on cable. But they also consistently got middling reviews, and the franchise holds something of a lesser status in the horror genre pantheon.

Final Destination and Final Destination 3 were directed by James Wong, and they were written and produced by Wong and his creative partner Glen Morgan. Wong and Morgan were regular writers on The X-Files and wrote some memorable episodes (“Squeeze,” “E.B.E.,” “Home”). Wong directed a good episode of the show titled “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.” He also directed the heinous Dragonball: Evolution, but for the purposes of this review we won’t hold it against him.

The opening portion of Final Destination feels reminiscent of an episode of The X-Files (it was originally written as one by Jeffrey Reddick), and it has a sense of irony that looks like The Twilight Zone if you squint a little. A high school kid named Alex (Devon Sawa) has an irrational and superstitious fear of flying. He wants to keep the tag on his bag from the last flight he was on, because he knows that that plane landed safely. When he gets to the airport, he can’t help but notice odd things. John Denver (who died in a plane crash) playing in the bathroom. A knob on a chair-back tray table coming off. Then, he has a vision of the entire plane going down, in vivid detail.

His deepest fear confirmed, Alex flips out and gets kicked off the plane, taking a group of his classmates and a teacher (Kristen Cloke) with him. When the plane actually crashes, more odd incidents start occurring revolving around this group of survivors…people who weren’t supposed to survive.

My thoughts on the Final Destination franchise have always been two-fold. One: it is a clever premise with some legs, but ultimately the films rarely accomplish much in the horror department. Two: I saw the scene in Final Destination 2 where a character gets decapitated by an elevator when I was far too young, and I spent multiple years having that scene trigger in my head every time I walked through the threshold into an elevator. One of these points is more pertinent than the other.

The first Final Destination plays the horror fairly straight, but the idea of elaborate and drawn-out death sequences being carried out by an unseen and all-powerful force is categorically a comedy premise. The first death in this exemplifies this just fine. We see the ever-slowly-moving water leak approach the teen’s feet as he reaches for the boombox cord. Poor Tod (Chad Donella) is fiddling with various sharp items, knicks himself with a safety razor. He plugs in the boombox, but wait! The John Denver song freaks him out, and he unplugs it just before the water touches him. Then, something that has been mostly out of sight the entire scene does Tod in.

It’s a comedic scene, structurally speaking. It heightens to a misdirection, subverting the expectation of the spectator. And it even throws in a morbid little button, the cherry on top of a pair of scissors just out of reach. The scissors which could save his life.

The far less elaborate second death is the exact opposite type of joke. After watching a drawn-out sequence of mysterious death, that’s what the audience expects of the second. Instead, the abruptness of the second death uses repetition to misdirect again. Plus, the line that immediately follows the death is a scripted punchline.

These scenes don’t feel particularly comedic, though, because the tone of the film is otherwise so dour. Later entries in the franchise will play directly into the oddity of the franchise’s core premise. But here, it just doesn’t fit. As a result, the death scenes just play strangely. Except for the death of the teacher, Ms. Lewton. That scene goes all out in a way that feels like a bit from a Scary Movie sequel.

The film benefits from a cast containing some budding new Hollywood talent. Sawa is a bit wooden when it comes to emotional moments—his response to the apparent suicide of his character’s best friend lacks believability. But he fares much better when he is talking out loud to capital-D Death like a raving madman. Ali Larter is very capable given she’s straddled with a lackluster character that has a silly name (Clear Rivers), and Seann William Scott is serviceable as comic relief. The real hero, though, is Tony Todd, who seems to be aware of what this franchise’s tone really ought to be. He plays it straight but makes a meal out of it. It’s hilarious.

As much as Final Destination can be said to be about anything other than elaborate sequences of death, it is about control. This would be fitting of a horror movie circling around mostly teenage characters (most of whom are also coded as misfits). The script doesn’t have much to say about this control or lack thereof, though. It just has characters pay lip service to the idea every now and then.

Ultimately, the first film in this franchise has good moments and a funny premise. It jump-started a franchise with more downs than ups, but in isolation it is a nice little artifact of Y2K horror.

Final Destination: C+

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)