Final Destination 3

I watched Final Destination 3 last night on DVD. I saw it when it initially came out, put the DVD in a box, and revisited it to get psyched for the new film, The Final Destination. I enjoy all the Final Destination movies. They're a nice twist on the dead teenager movie genre. They all feature a set-up disaster where some teens are going to die but one of them has a premonition and a few of them are saved from their fates while their friends die. But death doesn't like to be cheated, so It comes for them in creative ways, piling up bodies by the end of the 90 minute runtime. I made my parents watch the first film and while they hate horror movies, they had a good time with it. I think the second movie is the funniest and most over-the-top of the series, each death scene more outlandish than the one before it. The third installment combines the serious tone of the first film and some of the comedy of the second to make a great sequel. I actually liked this movie a lot better on my second viewing.

The opening sequence of Final Destination 3 is my favorite of the three movies. I mean, who hasn't dreamed of dying on a roller-coaster? That's what makes them so fun to ride, such adrenaline-pumping experiences. Once you're strapped in (double check that the harness is locked, maybe even pulling it a bit tighter to your chest), you can't do anything as the cars climb the steep hill overlooking the entire park for the first, giant stomach-lifting drop and then you scream as you plummet through corkscrews, loops, and hairpin turns. After some bone-jarring bumps and screeching brakes, you arrive where you started. I remember, as a kid, claiming to have "conquered" certain rides. I conquered The Demon, The Big Dipper, The Colossus, The Ninja, The Viper, etc. I yielded and I overcame. But what would happen if the roller-coaster train came off the tracks or got stuck upside-down at the top of a loop? That would suck. And Final Destination 3 does a great job of showing you why it would suck so bad.

The surviving high school seniors, the ones who got off the ride after the main girl had a premonition of their collective demise, are now haunted by their having "cheated" death (and main girl is really sad that her boyfriend remained on the ride and was brutally killed). Death will come for them and in this film, It comes for them based on images in a series of pictures the main girl took of them at the amusement park before the ride. The pictures show how they will meet their ends. And their ends are bloody (by ends, I don't mean rear ends or butts or buttholes because that would be disgusting; I mean their deaths). I don't want to give away the circumstances of their deaths because that's the point of the movie.* The characters exist only in reference to how they will die. Some of the sequences are pretty funny. All are extremely gory. One scene in particular made me want to vomit. A fun family popcorn flick.

I hope the new film, The Final Destination (3-D in select theatres), is as good as any of the previous films. I'm not expecting much based on the previews, but maybe the 3-D approach will work. I've never seen a movie in the theatre in 3-D, so this will be the first. It will be the last if I leave with a migraine. Go Team.

*I put this at the end because it's a spoiler: There is a major flaw in the logic of the film. One of the characters (a punk kid named Ass Cheeks with a video camera) who dies in the premonition sequence is partly responsible for the crash. His video camera gets smacked out of his hands during a loop and lands on the track, and becomes part of the chain of events that causes the cars to derail. If he isn't on the ride, his camera doesn't fall on the tracks. The cars don't derail. No accident. So I'm still wondering how the ride crashed and killed all those innocent dickwads without him on it. I'm trying to find logical explanations in a movie where an operatorless fork lift drives itself through a wall because some hammers fell on its gear shift and acceleration pedal.

Drop Zone

When Gary Busey shows up wearing a pair of Zebra Pants, you realize that the amazing movie you are watching on Encore is going to grab your balls tightly and twist them slightly. After all, what wouldn’t be amazing about a bunch of criminal skydivers who hack into government computer systems to find out the undercover identities of DEA agents so they can sell the information to drug kingpins for bucks? Wesley Snipes joins the fun as a Federal Agent in charge of transporting the skydiving crew’s computer specialist by plane to prison. He doesn’t know that those skydivers are going to hijack the plane, kill his brother, scream maniacally at a little girl while making menacing faces, and “break out” their hacker. Luckily they have parachutes and guns. A daring prison escape at 35,000 feet. A little bit of exposition in the aftermath tells us how badass and impossible this feat truly is. Now Wesley Snipes has to infiltrate the underground world of competitive skydiving to find the sonofabitches that killed his brother. He loses his badge, of course, so he has to go all maverick and lone wolf. Wesley is the Lone Wolf. He goes to a skydiving school and learns to skydive by screaming like a goddamn chimpanzee while plummeting towards the earth. Or maybe a rhesus monkey. After a few jumps, he is ready to join an elite team of divers that will jump over the White House on the 4th of July during a dazzling fireworks display. It’s the only way to get at the bad guys because they can't pass up the adrenaline-pumping experience and they’ll use the jump as an opportunity to break into another government building. In skydiver world, jumpers hang out in bars and speak their own language of blue skies and burn ins. If you look out of place, four big dudes in green Adidas track suits will approach you, intimidate you, and fight you. But if you have an “in” with a hot skydiving instructor, she’ll help you out. She has friends. One of them is a dude named Swoop and he’s the hero of the story, not Snipes. Swoop is an unemployed bum (or hobo, if you prefer) who lives only to skydive. He doesn’t sleep on the streets like normal hobos (or bums, if you prefer); he sleeps on those window washer platforms among dirty rags and Snickers wrappers. Patrick Chewing. The Statchew of Liberty. Dickers. He wears his jumpsuit and his parachute everywhere he goes so he can make instant escapes. He pulls crazy moves during competitions like releasing his main chute so it wraps around an asshole skydiver while he parachutes through the sky. This is called “gift-wrapping”. Back-slapping and overly enthusiastic gestures and yelling and guffawing typify the average skydiver. So do colorful, thin jumpsuits unzipped to the belly button and spread open to reveal layers of thick, manly chest hair. (I didn’t realize that skydiving had its own unique culture until I watched this movie. It’s kind of like how I learned about the underground surfing movement from Point Break.) There are a bunch of fights between Wesley's crew and Busey's crew, including a bathroom brawl and a cat fight between our heroic female Instructor and the Evil Whore from the Badguy Team. The Instructor bashes the Whore’s head with the lid of a copy machine while the machine makes Xeroxes. I don’t remember how it all ends, but it has something to do with Gary Busey’s huge teeth and huge hair and a parachute and a Mack truck's windshield. It’s pretty fucking great. See it. It’s called Drop Zone.

Clutch: 50,000 Unstoppable Watts

So, the new Clutch album, Strange Cousins From The West, comes out today. I'm excited. I'll pick it up at lunch. Here's the video for the song 50,000 Unstoppable Watts. Enjoy.

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