Director: David R. Ellis
Starring: Shantel VanSanten, Bobby Campo and Haley Webb.
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 82 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011

| |

Rating notes: strong horror violence and sex scene

We have had three Final Destination movies, each with virtually the same plot (sometimes with the same characters): one of the young adults has a dream with not only a premonition of a disaster but actually seeing what happens – which fills out the running time to show the same events twice – and knowing who escaped death. However, Death seems to have different ideas and spends the rest of the film dispatching the survivors as gorily as possible while the hapless premonition visionary and close friends try to break the chain of order in which people are supposed to die. They always make a wrong presumption about this which means that Death inexorably follows through.

Well, that’s given away the plot – but most audiences venturing into this fourth episode (with a THE added for distinction just as two THEs were removed from the latest Fast and Furious to make it distinctive) will know exactly what to expect. The ‘where’ is different, a speedway track with devastation galore (and shown twice). But the distinctiveness about this film is the use of 3D. Not only are the destruction and deaths more vividly presented, they are literally almost in your face (severed heads, spiked faces, poundingly crushed bodies…).

One of the characters, a really obnoxious one, claims early in the film that he really goes to the track to see an accident which, if any of the fans notice, is a comment on why they are watching the film. (And he has quite a demise, being sucked through the draining system of an emptying swimming pool – buckets of blood and gore.)

Of course, technically it is all expertly done, vivid 3D effects. It provides some momentary gasps and jumps but it more than a little sadistic and pessimistic, everyone, likeable and unlikeable, being sacrificed to the special effects driven plot.