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'Final Destination 2' glorifies gore
By John Behling
Published:
Monday, February 10, 2003
John Behling -- Film Critic
During a chorus of groans, loud protests and uncomfortable bursts of laughter I was able to isolate the voice of a particular man sitting behind me.
"This is f--king nasty," he said, capturing the whole audience's feeling of discomfort for a number of blatantly graphic images in "Final Destination 2."
It reminded me of a drivers ed. course that I never took, but the kind that exists in my memory through seeing its parody on television or in the movies. It's the shot of the audience with the light flickering on their faces as they watch graphic images of car wrecks shown on instructional reel footage.
All the grimacing, twisting, complaining and even laughing comes as a product of a twistedly humor paradox: "if it's that bad why would you watch it?"
Well, after meditating on this question quite thoroughly, I have concluded that I like watching acts of graphic violence being inflicted on movie characters. Hmmm. Should I really be saying that? Do I want to admit to having a rather ferocious case of cinematic bloodlust? I don't see why not. It's human, why feel ashamed to be human?
"Final Destination 2" is part of the ugly yet towering guilty pleasure industry including, but not limited to, sexploitation films, slasher films, pornography and reality TV.
That last one may be a shocker, but it shouldn't be. Would Joe Millionaire be worth watching if he kept his whole cast of 20, twenty-something, shameless young professionals and retired into a rented mansion in France?
Of course not. What people are really watching for is their slow and systematic elimination. Not getting the necklace or the rose, or being voted off the island or out of the inner circle or off the bus or whatever is the contemporary equivalent of the girl in the horror flick who goes out into the garage alone to get the rest of the beer. When Joe Millionaire doesn't choose the blonde girl with the curly hair, the camera zooms in like an idiot with a camera at a crime scene. We see the tears, we see the humiliation, we see the pain and somehow we feel less guilty than if instead we'd seen her torn apart by a weed whipper. Now who's the sociopath?
In order to attain the wholesome sadistic glee of cathartic teen slaughter, I had to become a masochist of sorts in order to endure "Final Destination 2" as a feature film.
It's an obvious case of situationalist script writing. How do we get the characters in this situation to set up this death? How do we impale, burn, crush, dismember and choke with enough variety to keep the audience guessing? How do we make each ridiculous accidental death remotely believable?
This is where the bulk of the film's creative forces are at work, and also where the film pays off. There's only one death that doesn't exactly make the grade and the quality of coincidence reality manslaughter is definitely a tier up from the original.
The paper thin plot which is splashed in between deaths comes directly from the horror sequel writer's handbook: bring back one character from the original who knows some secret weakness of the villain and concoct a plan to save the day and beat the malicious force.
Where this prewritten story comes at odds with the "Final Destination" franchise is with the concept of the malevolent villain. The unstoppable force which stalks these sexy teenagers isn't a knife wielding catatonic or an axe toting hockey goalie, yet an abstract creation, a force of nature: death itself. How do you fight death?
One horrendous scenario comes to mind: a skeleton figure in a black hooded robe carrying a scythe is lured into a trap where he is simultaneously burned, drown, torn to pieces by an explosion, excommunicated, tamed by the powers of an autistic child or carried to Hell by vengeful demons.
Luckily this isn't what screenwriters came up with. Instead you are left with a pathetic revelation which even leaves one of the characters saying, in unison with the entire audience,
"Isn't that a stretch." It is, in fact, the whole film is a stretch. Functionally, it acts only as a wrapper stretched celluloid-thin to encase a selection of brutally indulgent curtain calls, which judged apart from the film are surprisingly well done and commendably fearless in their content.
It's a send back to the gross-out expeditions of Herschell Gordon-Lewis. (If you liked "Final Destination 2" check out his blood trilogy, if not disregard entirely) It's a test of modern technology playing its hand in the gross-out industry which was formerly ruled by pig guts and latex moldings. It's a lot of teen actors getting butchered while at the same time butchering their utterly simplistic dialogue.
Whether you see it as a seven dollar thrill or as an experiment into human nature there's one thing that isn't in question: It's simply "F--king nasty"
