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A high school French class is just about to jet off to Paris for an amazing, and surely educational, field trip. All the students get on board the plane, and that’s when it happens. Alex has a vision that shortly after take off, the airplane explodes, killing everyone inside. He freaks out, tries to warn everyone and eventually stays behind with six others. While they’re arguing in the terminal about missing the trip, the plane explodes in mid-air. Because of Alex’s vision, they’ve cheated death. But not for long.

Finally, we get an effective horror movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The problem with so many in the genre is that they try to pump you full of scares by playing around with musical cues or creating unnecessary tension. Most of the time, it doesn’t work and simply comes off as being just another pathetically stereotypical slasher flick. “Final Destination” isn’t like that. It isn’t even scary. It does give the audience plenty of shock, however. You never really know when death is going to hit people. Sometimes it’s extremely sudden and comes out of left field (and usually really funny when it does), and other times it finds a long-winded roundabout way to take its victim. No matter how the life is taken, you can rest assured (in peace) that it’ll be entertaining..

That’s not to say the movie isn’t without faults. While the characters can’t escape Death’s master plan; the dialogue can’t escape the cheese. Although most of the time it is surprisingly natural, the group of writers, including director James Wong (“The X-Files”) feel the need to put a lot of joking and casual references to death, dying, killing, dropping dead and the like. It was, dare I say, overkill. I also thought that using John Denver’s song “Rocky Mountain High” was a nice touch, but once again, played to “death.”

I also think they dropped the ball with finding a way to actually make the movie frightening. It accomplishes the not so serious nature of “Scream” without as much terror and none of the self-referential satire, which is good. But it fails to capitalize on the psychological fears that live inside all of us. These characters essentially know that they’re going to die, and it’s going to be much sooner than later. To make the movie creepier, they could have done more to show how that affects them. But if you’re looking for a solid, unconventional horror movie, you won’t find too many more as purposefully silly and outright entertaining as “Final Destination.” I can’t really say I’m “dying” for a sequel, though.

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