Final Destination 5





Directed By: Steven Quale

Starring: Nicholas D'Agosto, Emma Bell, Arlen Escarpeta, and Miles Fisher

Great horror films are the stuff from which nightmares are born.  They can make the most fearless individuals a bit apprehensive.  The terrors in these movies are immortalized on film and in our memories.  Bad horror flicks are exactly the opposite.  They're the examples that give the horror genre a bad rap.  Final Destination 5 is sadly just another bad horror pic that lacks scares, thrills, and any creativity whatsoever.

Sam Lawton (Nicholas D'Agosto) works for Presage, a manufacturing firm.  They send him on a company retreat that goes terribly awry.  When the bus stops on a bridge under construction  on it's way to the retreat grounds, he has a vision of death and destruction because of the bridge's untimely collapse.  Sam then proceeds to get off the bus and the bridge.  He takes a few friends and co-workers along with him.  They narrowly escape with their lives as the bridge collapse kills hundreds.  Their survival is not part of death's plan.  It creates a "wrinkle in reality".  As such, death will not let Sam and his friends escape their fates.  They're all living on borrowed time.

Final Destination 5 is one of those unusually crappy horror flicks that just reminds you why the horror genre gets no respect.  This is partly due to the lack of effort by the studio and its filmmakers.  It is also due to the tired premise of the Final Destination series.  Because of the fact that there is no serial killer personified in the series, the filmmaking has to be on point to actually be scary.  The filmmakers are charged with creating a dark and ominous world that frightens audiences because there's no one on screen to embody the reason for which moviegoers should be terrified.  With minimal efforts by both the studio and it's filmmakers to put out a good flick, all the blood and gore in this flick just falls flat.  Final Destination 5 fails miserably as a horror film; it feels more like a poorly executed spoof of the genre.  It's so awful that it's not even funny.

The premise of any Final Destination film is that persons who are supposed to die in some catastrophic event do not.  By escaping their demise, they have effectively defied fate, and death evens the score with a vengeance in a series of elaborately constructed death scenes.  Obviously, this is the fifth time that this is being done so the concept is anything but revolutionary.  That being said, I now have certain expectations for a Final Destination film, and absolutely none of them were met.

I don't go into a horror film expecting to see greatness.  I know that it's all about the deaths and a few sick thrills.  However, there have to at least be a few moments in a decent horror flick worth a few gasps.  You'll get none of that in this ill-conceived horror flick. Final Destination 5 is so terrible that it deserves a 0.12% rating.  How you get to this drunken state is irrelevant.  The only way you'll enjoy this film is if you get wasted beforehand.  Go to a bar or a liquor store, and do what you need to do if you want to watch this one.