Terminal Destination

This movie opened as the Number One movie at the US box office last weekend.

It is the first movie in the series that is presented in 3D. What does that mean? Lots of ridiculous stuff comes flying at you when you wear those glasses. Mostly the stuff of dreams or visions, these unexplained images are supposed to add up to the way in which another character will die.

It is actually the fourth movie in the series which is probably why they weren't able to put the '3D' in the actual title of the film. Whether this will really be the 'final' destination for the film series really depends upon how much money it makes.

There are eleven deaths in this movie. More than any previous film in the series and most of them involve a gruesome set piece that is played more for comedic value rather than gore. All the deaths seem designed to elicit collective roars of approval from audiences rather than groans or fainting spells.

If you've watched even one of the earlier movies in the series you will know that the machinations are fairly straightforward.

One individual has a premonition of a horrible accident that will cause the deaths of all the people around him or her. That person freaks out, insists upon an immediate eviction of the place, a few people leave and those are the people left standing when the stuff from said person's vision comes true and kills everyone else. What they then learn is that the catastrophe was part of Death's grand design and all the people who survived the accident will still die during the course of the movie, in the exact order that they were meant to die in the accident.

In this latest edition the makers have stayed true to formula. There are a couple of nods to sequences from earlier editions in the series and there is one particularly clever nod to a short story by Chuck Palahniuk that needs to be seen to be re-lived. If you've read the story you'll know what I mean.

All said and done, this is a movie about delivering cheap thrills in as audacious a manner as possible. Forget plot, characters or even storytelling. If you're in the mood for a polite splatterfest and a few uneasy laughs, this is the movie for you.