Final Destination (1999)
Starring:Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith
Director: James Wong
Synopsis: Death will not be cheated…excellent premonition chiller didn't foresee its success.
Reviewed by: Ali Khan

As the plane carrying forty American students to Paris on a field trip prepares for take-off, Alex, one of the students, experiences a terrifying premonition in which he sees the aircraft explode in mid-air. Panic ensues and Alex, along with six others (five students and a teacher), is ejected from the flight before it leaves the ground.

Sure enough, as they sit dejected in the departure lounge waiting for a later flight, their friends are blown out of the sky.

But Death is not so easily cheated.

Having been robbed of the six lives that were meant to be his, the Grim Reaper sets about reclaiming them. One by one, an unseen force begins to kill the survivors.

Only Alex, who continues to experience premonitions of the impending deaths, may be able to outwit Death. If he succeeds, the remaining survivors will be spared...

...for the time being, at least.

I almost missed Final Destination, put off by its seemingly timid 15 certificate and the prospect of yet another teenage horror movie. However, from the very beginning the film is taut, tense and genuinely frightening. There are several wonderfully edge-of-the-seat sequences as well as two or three real shocks. The atmosphere throughout is deeply unsettling and some of the deaths are surprisingly nasty, particularly considering the film's relatively modest age rating.

Despite being consistently scary, the film also introduces a welcome degree of wit into the screenplay. Unlike the Scream series, however, the humour is used sparingly and never detracts from the horror.

Final Destination is helped immeasurably by making an unseen force the central villain rather than relying upon the usual crazed killers, monsters from Hell or other familiar horror clichés.

For me, Final Destination is the scariest horror film to reach our screens in many years. The Blair Witch Project was innovative, Scream redefined a genre, but Final Destination succeeds by taking a far more old-fashioned approach to generating fear.

It is simply a pleasure to watch a straightforward horror film that genuinely chills the blood.