Tag Archives: 2000

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Final Destination (2000) Movie Review

May 4, 2025 Alex Brannan

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 Continue reading Final Destination (2000) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Horror, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

The Friedberg-Seltzer Massacre: How Two Men Single-Handedly Destroyed the Parody Genre

August 20, 2022 Alex Brannan

This is installment one in “The Friedberg-Seltzer Massacre: How Two Men Single-handedly Destroyed the Parody Genre.” The series, a career retrospective on the works of parody film writer-directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, aims to put their heavily maligned work into perspective. Why were their films equally successful and hated? And why did the pair disappear from Hollywood? Moreover, can anything good be said for the directors, whose films are widely considered to be some of the worst of all time.

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer achieved their first credit as a writing team on Spy Hard, the 1996 Leslie Nielsen espionage spoof. Their names appeared in the credits for the hit horror parody Scary Movie. Then, they went on to write and direct some of the worst comedy movies of the 21st century. Date Movie. Epic Movie. Disaster Movie. Meet the Spartans. Vampires Suck. The Starving Games.

Let’s not dwell on these parody clunkers, though. Not yet, at least. Let’s begin with Scary Movie, a very successful film that had a hand in reinvigorating the parody genre for a new generation. It launched a franchise. It launched the career of Anna Faris. It was truly influential in steering the broad comedy into the 21st century, at least in the short term.

Scary Movie was an ambitious pitch. Not because it was a parody of the entire slasher genre with the audacity of having a name as blunt as Scary Movie. But because it is a beat-for-beat broad comedy re-enactment of Scream, which had already Continue reading The Friedberg-Seltzer Massacre: How Two Men Single-Handedly Destroyed the Parody Genre →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Criminal Lovers (2000) Movie Review

October 16, 2017 Alex Brannan

This review of Francois Ozon’s Criminal Lovers is part of the New French Extremity Retrospective series.

Francois Ozon’s Criminal Lovers begins as a Bonnie & Clyde narrative, where two kids of 17 kill a man in passion and go on the lam, robbing jewelry stores and convenience stores to get by as they make their way into the countryside. Then, it becomes something more akin to a Hansel & Gretel tale of survival.