3LB
09-01-2009, 04:04 PM
My son was wanting a last hurrah before school started this week so he and a few friends went to see Halloween 2 and Final Destination. And since they are only 15, and the movie theaters in our area are under scrutiny for some reason, I had to accompany them.
I am rather happy to say my son and at least one of his friends thought these movies were senseless, or as my son put it, "both movies are just all the different ways a person could die". Its the best summation I've heard. H2 was about the different ways one could be brutally murdered, while The Final Destination was about the different kinds of accidents that could brutally kill someone.
I can give Rob Zombie a pass for H2. He was a hack at making music and he's a hack director. It isn't like he's raping classic cinema when he's handed the keys to the new Halloween reboots, or other B movie reboots (The Blob in 2010). Lets face it, beyond the clever camera work and pacing of the original, it was at heart, a teen slasher film. Zombie removes the slow building tension and replaces it with protracted brutality - its now a fetish film.
Fetish film is also how I can describe the Final Destination series. I saw the first one and was underwhelmed, but at least it wasn't about murder. It coulda been a taught thriller with the specter of death looming around all the characters, but instead, its one conviluted, protracted death scene after another. Ingenious really, if you're a fan of watching people die horrible deaths, because at first you get to see a character's grizzly premonition of a tragic death sequence invloving a mass of humanity, which is then followed by singular occurences of gruesome death; its like a two'fer dude! Each subsequent movie is the same, only with ever improving realism and more conviluted ways to die; someone brushing their teeth is likely to slip and ram the toothbrush through the back of their skull. The Final Destination (supposedly the last installment) makes no pretense here, and is offered in gorious 3D. Appropriately, the scene of mass death to be narrowly avoided this time by the still doomed anyway protagonists is a stock car race, where some fans openly admit to liking the crashes anyway. You know the rest - someone's getting it in the eye, someone's getting decapitated, someone's getting an engine block in the chest...no, really.
I have no idea why this would be the last one, unless of course they're getting too expensive to make or something...nah, they use disposable actors and I doubt they used more than a napkin dispenser's worth of script. Maybe the next evolution for this sort of fetish is the real thing.
Avoid both, as if you needed to be forewarned, unless of course you've worn out your copies of Faces Of Death. The only thing missing from my weekend at the movies was a brutal, degrading rape scene - I'm sure there is a remake of I Spit On Your Grave in the works or maybe someone has downloaded Jodie Foster's rape scene from The Accused on YouTube.
Anyways, I wasn't disappointed with what I saw, since my expectations were met in spades. You can't polish a turd.
I am rather happy to say my son and at least one of his friends thought these movies were senseless, or as my son put it, "both movies are just all the different ways a person could die". Its the best summation I've heard. H2 was about the different ways one could be brutally murdered, while The Final Destination was about the different kinds of accidents that could brutally kill someone.
I can give Rob Zombie a pass for H2. He was a hack at making music and he's a hack director. It isn't like he's raping classic cinema when he's handed the keys to the new Halloween reboots, or other B movie reboots (The Blob in 2010). Lets face it, beyond the clever camera work and pacing of the original, it was at heart, a teen slasher film. Zombie removes the slow building tension and replaces it with protracted brutality - its now a fetish film.
Fetish film is also how I can describe the Final Destination series. I saw the first one and was underwhelmed, but at least it wasn't about murder. It coulda been a taught thriller with the specter of death looming around all the characters, but instead, its one conviluted, protracted death scene after another. Ingenious really, if you're a fan of watching people die horrible deaths, because at first you get to see a character's grizzly premonition of a tragic death sequence invloving a mass of humanity, which is then followed by singular occurences of gruesome death; its like a two'fer dude! Each subsequent movie is the same, only with ever improving realism and more conviluted ways to die; someone brushing their teeth is likely to slip and ram the toothbrush through the back of their skull. The Final Destination (supposedly the last installment) makes no pretense here, and is offered in gorious 3D. Appropriately, the scene of mass death to be narrowly avoided this time by the still doomed anyway protagonists is a stock car race, where some fans openly admit to liking the crashes anyway. You know the rest - someone's getting it in the eye, someone's getting decapitated, someone's getting an engine block in the chest...no, really.
I have no idea why this would be the last one, unless of course they're getting too expensive to make or something...nah, they use disposable actors and I doubt they used more than a napkin dispenser's worth of script. Maybe the next evolution for this sort of fetish is the real thing.
Avoid both, as if you needed to be forewarned, unless of course you've worn out your copies of Faces Of Death. The only thing missing from my weekend at the movies was a brutal, degrading rape scene - I'm sure there is a remake of I Spit On Your Grave in the works or maybe someone has downloaded Jodie Foster's rape scene from The Accused on YouTube.
Anyways, I wasn't disappointed with what I saw, since my expectations were met in spades. You can't polish a turd.