31 Days of Horror: Final Destination 2

“Some people say there's a balance to everything. For every life there's a death, for every death, there is a life.”

Filmology Rating: 2.5 out of 4

Three years after audiences saw the terror on Flight 180, which gave them all a phobia of flying, they saw a new terror. A terror that most of us could face everyday, the horror that could come with driving. While the simplistic act of driving itself isn’t the main horror for most people, the aspect that scares me the most and hopefully others is that you have no control over any of the other cars on the road; they could be one text away from creating a massive car pileup.

When Kimberly, played by A.L. Cook, has a preminsion that her the road leading her to her spring break vacation will soon be covered in a bloody chaos she quickly convinces her friends that the trip is a bad idea and that they will all die if they attempt the journey. Death, however, doesn’t like being cheated from its victims, so it begins claiming its victims one by one.

Like most horror films the character development is nonexistent and the characters in Final Destination 2 are especially bland. They each have that one defining characteristic but never evolve from that. Even the returning character from the previous film feels rather redundant in Final Destination 2 since she doesn’t add any developments to the plot or any new ripples to her character. The character was simply in the film to add to its length, the film drags when it tries to care about the characters since it does it so infrequently. The film simply offers the most cliche and bland characters that it can but since that isn’t where the film is trying to excel it can be let off the hook slightly.

While Final Destination played some of the deaths as a cat and mouse game with the audience seeing all of the gruesome ways the soon to be corpse could die, you have Final Destination 2 playing almost every death like that. They are all sinister games that leave you squirming in your seat thinking that death could strike at any moment. This is probably the most terrifying element of Final Destination 2, with each set piece creating some gruesome and terrifying ways that its cast can die. The Final Destination series has a fascination with making the mundane into the horrifying; taking our everyday lives and telling us how grateful we should be to be alive right now.

For those who don’t appreciate dark comedy, you will find Final Destination 2 to be a slug of offensive violence that does nothing to move the horror genre forward. However if you are one of those, like myself, who enjoys the more sinister ironic turns that life can take then you will find Final Destination 2 to be a breath of fresh air and a film that will help transform a new subgenre of horror.

Rating: Rent It

-Jonny G