Director: John Carpenter
Writers: John Carpenter, Debra Hill
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance, Nancy Kyes, P. J. Soles, Charles Cyphers, Kyle Richards, Tony Moran
Runtime: 91 mins.
1978
Halloween is, adjusted for inflation, one of the most profitable indie movies of all time. Made on a shoestring budget of $300,000, it's the film that shot horror great John Carpenter into the mainstream consciousness. Boy is it apparent how cheap it is, too.
One could hardly blame low budget horror for looking like low budget horror. It's just funny to note the ridiculous inconsistencies that rear their head in every other scene. It's supposed to be Halloween, yet every street full of lush greenery. Except for the arbitrary scene when they sprung for a bunch of dead brown leaves to blow down the sidewalk in a half-assed attempt at seasonal atmosphere. The screenplay also shows the shabbiness of a cheap, rushed production. Any cursory scrutiny will reveal plot chasms and incomprehensible timelines for what ought to be a rather straightforward set-up: a couple of teenagers stuck babysitting instead of going out to enjoy the Halloween festivities, and the monstrous killer who stalks them.
Director: Steven Quale
Writer: Eric Heisserer
Cast: Nicholas D'Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher, Ellen Wroe, Jacqueline MacInnes Wood, P. J. Byrne, Arlen Escarpeta, David Koechner, Courtney B. Vance, Tony Todd
Runtime: 92 mins.
2011
Final Destination 5 begins with one of the truly ugly credit sequences of our time. Computer-generated objects hurtle towards the screen, shattering it over and over again as if that pesky fourth wall just didn't know when to quit. The film ends much the same way, with a much snazzier supercut of every death in the storied franchise. As much as is possible, FD5 has a great respect for the franchise it has inherited, and with that respect comes attentiveness, both to what has worked in the past and what hasn't. Thus FD5 is in some ways the most functional entry.
It is also the first to exist outside the dueling paradigms of James Wong and David R. Ellis. Not since Final Destination 2 has an entirely new creative team taken the reins on one of these movies. This time the helmsman is Steven Quale, making his mainstream directorial debut after a handful of high profile second unit directing gigs scattered over a decade. Writing the script is Eric Heisserer, a horror journeyman who most recently wrote Lights Out and is signed on to adapt Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. With this fresh blood comes a clear-eyed perspective not brought to the proceedings since, again, Final Destination 2. We spend a surprising amount of time getting to know the characters before their work-related bus trip turns disastrous on an enormous suspension bridge. A few of these characters actually have rudimentary arcs before their timely deaths, an astounding development for a Final Destination entry, especially this late in the game.
Director: David R. Ellis
Writer: Eric Bress
Cast: Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten, Nick Zano, Haley Webb, Mykelti Williamson, Krista Allen, Andrew Fiscella, Justin Welborn, Stephanie Honore, Lara Grice, Jackson Walker
Runtime: 82 mins.
2009
One would be forgiven for thinking The Final Destination to be the ultimate entry in the franchise, purely on the basis of its misleading title. This is not the case. In fact, despite its arbitrary jettisoning of the numbered sequel naming convention, this feels more like a run-of-the-mill numbered sequel than any other entry in the series. Very little is decisive or definitive about this particular entry.
That's not to say there's nothing unique about it. In a strange departure, this is the first Final Destination movie with an inciting incident that does not involve the paranoia of riding in a mechanical vehicle. Rather, our heroes are observing others riding in mechanical vehicles at some sort of stock car race. If we were to be generous, we would suggest that the film is establishing its theme of audiences and the act of watching. If we were being less generous, we would suggest that this is Death's most rushed and contrived initiating disaster yet.
A couple weeks ago, Red Letter Media dropped a bomb on Youtube: Plinkett's review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. For those of you not in the know, Plinkett is a fictitious facetious centenarian serial killer sociopath who also reviews movies. He skewers films with structural analysis buffered by short skits of him doing or saying over-the-top awful things. Sometimes it's entertaining, sometimes it's simply gross.
The reason any of this is important is that four years ago, Plinkett released a series of videos ripping the prequel trilogy to shreds. These videos were funny and insightful enough to be catapulted into mainstream consciousness. The highest trafficked video now sits at almost seven and a half million views. Everybody in the nerd community was talking about these things. The videos did their part to shape the landscape of online film criticism for better or for worse.
Part of their appeal was the methodical way Plinkett dissected the prequels. He took his time and delivered hours of criticism about what exactly went wrong. For that reason I think Star Wars fans found the analysis cathartic in a way. Released seven years after Revenge of the Sith, folks were finally ready to view the prequel abominations with a clear head and a sense of humor.
So Plinkett has selected this moment to share his views on The Force Awakens--sufficient time for the post-release hype to settle down, but not yet distracted by Rogue One. After all, it's not like he could have waited until the trilogy was finished for his analysis. They're going to be making these movies until you die.
In much the same way that the original Star Wars trilogy was a breath of fresh air that invigorated and reshaped the industry and The Force Awakens was a pandering and ultimately unsatisfying remix of that formula, Plinkett's new video feels like a hollow imitation of his culturally resonant videos from four years ago. You can take a peek at it here, though I will caution that it is long and not terribly fruitful.
The video is crippled by baffling structural choices. Although it purports to be a Force Awakens review, precious little of its runtime is dedicated to The Force Awakens, and even that is hardly substantive. Most of the video insists on revisiting the prequels, ostensibly to explore how the cultural discussion on them has shifted in recent years. It ends up feeling redundant. Plinkett continually brings up the importance of his original videos apropos of nothing, a narcissistic move that is arguably in character, but isn't really germane to the discussion at hand.
But the worst of it comes an hour and twenty-six minutes in, when Plinkett tackles diversity.
Director: James Wong
Writers: Glen Morgan, James Wong
Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, Kris Lemche, Alexz Johnson, Sam Easton, Jesse Moss, Gina Holden, Texas Battle, Chelan Simmons, Crystal Lowe, Amanda Crew
Runtime: 93 mins.
2006
After Final Destination 2 did all the good work of elevating the franchise, embracing a consistent tone, expanding the mythology, and adding a layer of meta-commentary, Final Destination 3 does the work of dismantling all that progress in favor of sexist reductive schlock. It was fun while it lasted.
Final Destination 3 is still fun in the way that a franchise about death invisibly hunting teenagers through Rube Goldberg machines must be fun, but this entry sure squeezes a lot of air out of the premise. Final Destination 3's initiating incident takes place on a roller coaster. Straight off the bat the movie lets us know we will not be caring about any of these characters. It also makes a needlessly big and complicated deal of who is sitting where on the coaster, for shaggy plot purposes. Then it hits us with the most ridiculous coaster-gone-wrong sequence that one could possibly imagine. Again, there is fun to be had with the inflated nonsense, but the sequence disrespects the dread surrounding FD1's plane crash, or the intricacy of FD2's car pile-up.
Director: Nate Parker
Writers: Nate Parker, Jean McGianni Celestin
Cast: Nate Parker, Armie Hammer, Penelope Ann Miller, Jackie Earle Haley, Mark Boone Junior, Colman Domingo, Aunjanue Ellis, Dwight Henry, Aja Naomi King
Runtime: 120 mins.
2016
Sometimes it's impossible, or at least unethical, to discuss a movie without its cultural context. First of all there's the title, a blatant reference to D. W. Griffith's 1915 opus Birth of a Nation, a historically important film that functions as a glorified argument in favor of the KKK and slavery. This mirrored title is a thematic inversion, a statement of intent, and also a cheeky way to generate buzz.
Awards buzz, specifically. The anticipation for this film has come with the built-in assumption that it would be in some capacity as Oscar contender, as it is the sprawling biopic of Nat Turner, historical leader of a famous slave revolt in the early nineteenth century. And the Oscars only seem to pay attention to black films if they're about slavery.
Director: Tate Taylor
Writer: Erin Cressida Wilson
Cast: Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, Haley Bennett, Justin Theroux, Luke Evans, Edgar Ramirez, Laura Prepon, Allison Janney
Runtime: 112 mins.
2016
The Girl on the Train is a trashy thriller with higher aspirations. The film begins almost impressionistically, as we are exposed piecemeal to the mental landscape of Rachel (Emily Blunt), the closest thing we have to a protagonist. Her life in disarray after the implosion of her marriage, all she does anymore is drink and ride trains. One particular train, actually, the one that passes her old house where her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) has a child with his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). Emily watches their lives unfold through panes of glass, just as she has become fascinated by the lives of their neighbors two doors down, Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Edgar Ramirez). Once this tripartite dynamic has been established, an inciting incident occurs in a tunnel that neither we nor our protagonist are exactly clear on (her being in a drunken stupor when it played out). What happened in that tunnel and even who it involved are obscured to us, presented only in brief flashes. We merely know that something went down.
From there we're off to the races, as the stories of each of the three women are lugubriously fleshed out with liberal use of flashbacks and perspectival shift. The Girl on the Train is certainly a more formally bold thriller than it has any right to be, though one can guess that the somewhat crystalline structure of the truth surrounding these three women is a holdover from the novel by Paula Hawkins. It doesn't always pay off.
Director: David R. Ellis
Writers: J. Mackye Gruber, Eric Bress, Jeffrey Reddick
Cast: A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, Ali Larter, Keegan Connor Tracy, Jonathan Cherry, Terrence C. Carson, David Paetkau, Lynda Boyd, James Kirk, Tony Todd
Runtime: 90 mins.
2003
It is as if the powers that be heard my complaint about Final Destination--the way it waffles between tones without fully finding its feet--and decided to commit wholesale to the campy ridiculousness of the freshly franchised premise. You've seen it all before; disaster strikes, but not before our main character has borne witness to a vision that lets her prevent a select group of victims from being victimized. But Death doesn't like that very much. Death likes that so little that it will hunt you down and butcher you in ridiculous and sometimes demeaning ways.
That's not all. Our hero Kim Corman (A.J. Cook) soon realizes that her averted accident, a deadly traffic pile-up on a highway, occurred exactly one year after that crazy business with the airplane from the last movie, and she must convince her fellow survivors of the relevance of this fact. Once they've all banded together, they are just one clunky expository scene away from figuring out what exactly it is that connects them all. Let's just say that Death is fastidious, and prefers to do some spring cleaning every so often.
Director: James Wong
Writers: Glen Morgan, James Wong, Jeffrey Reddick
Cast: Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith, Amanda Detmer, Chad Donella, Kristen Cloke, Seann William Scott, Tony Todd
Runtime: 98 mins.
2000
The premise of Final Destination is one that filled me with dread many years before I was allowed to watch the movie. What if death has a grand plan? What if that plan was disrupted by a vision that caused the saving of people who shouldn't be saved? What if death were petty and proceeded to hunt those people down by subtly manipulating their environments into complex death traps? This is the very situation that protagonists Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) and Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) find themselves in after Alex freaks out and gets a handful of people expelled from an airplane right before it explodes on take-off.
Final Destination finds itself at an odd nexus between the goofy teen slashers of the late 90's, as trailblazed by Scream, and the self-serious torture porn films of the 00's, as pioneered by Saw. It is a film caught in the middle, as evidenced by its schizophrenic approach to the material.
On the serious side, the film plays hard at drumming up dread. Devon Sawa's sweaty jitters work best in the first act, as Alex experiences a great deal of anxiety over the prospect on getting on an airplane for his class trip to France. Something just feels wrong about the whole thing. The entire sequence is designed to play hard on the audience's anxieties about flying. We may know intellectually that planes are safe, but there's a certain primal instinct that won't let us forget that we are defying nature every time we propel an enormous metal tube through the air.
