Final Destination 3
October 2006 Reviewed by: Randall Smith Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Final Destination was released in 2000. It was a horror movie that follows a high school boy who escapes a fiery plane crash because of a vision he has sitting on the plane before it takes off. This vision of the plane crashing causes the student to freak out and unsettle the other passengers. Seven people get off the plane and then witness it crash. The film’s premise is that you can’t cheat death like that. The rest of the movie follows these survivors as death comes to reclaim their lives. This formula has been passed down to Final Destination 2 and now Final Destination 3.

This most recent installment involves a group of students at a senior fair, just days before their graduation. As our teenage characters get on a menacing rollercoaster, one girl has a vision similar to those in the previous Final Destination movies. Of course, this vision causes quite a stir, and a number of students get off the ride. The rollercoaster crashes. The movie spends the next 75 minutes killing off each surviving student in very original and grotesque ways, until they finally break the cycle. Or do they?

These movies are a lot of fun in the way that the Saw and Scream movie franchises are. This one is more shocking than it is scary. What enlarges that shock is the film’s active use of surround sound. The opening scene is a perfect example. The sounds of a fair, crowd noise, and music fill the surround channels, but not at the low levels we usually hear ambient sound. In this scene it is much louder and more detailed. We get the sounds of a roller coaster panning across the rear soundstage, and the bells and whistles of the fair games are so accurate they place us right in the scene. These uses of the surround channels are so effective they sometimes distracted me from following the film. I just love them!

Visually the DVD is solid. No grain to speak of in the darker backgrounds, and the facial details are sharp and meticulous. The viewer is in store for blood and guts galore, and the cinematographer does not rob us of their effect; the colors are all full of life and very vivid.

A fun element of this DVD is an interactive feature that allows the viewer to choose the direction the film will take. How often watching a scary movie have you put yourself into the endangered character’s position? Have you ever thought to yourself, "Why did he do that?" or "Girl, you better run!"? This feature allows you to make a choice for them, heads or tails, and if you choose right, you may save the day. The disc also includes one audio commentary, a few sneak peeks, and a couple of DVD-ROM extras. Most of these extras are pretty standard, but the interactive feature is fun and worth a watch.

Most scary movies are not really that scary these days. Maybe Hollywood has run out of unique ideas, or maybe moviegoers have become harder to scare. Final Destination 3 doesn’t pretend to be a masterpiece of a film. But what it does do well is to entertain and sometimes to shock and startle you in original ways. There is a bit of nudity and more than a fair number of horrific death scenes, but if you can handle these, it is definitely fun, especially in a DVD transfer as good as this one.

• Go Back