A Co-Op Critics Review!

Player 1: OnePumpedNinja

With a self-contradicting title like Final Destination 3, there is little more to expect than what you expect to expect from the expectations of the previous films. It’s the same old tale with fresh new faces to get smoked in the most morbidly creative ways imagineable on film.
It is the same plot as before: a group of high-school teenagers celebrate their seniority at an amusement park and something goes terribly wrong with the roller coaster. The yearbook photographer Wendy (Mary Winstead) and a couple of students escape death thanks to a premonition of things to come. As before, the Grim Reaper is seriously pissed that those pesky teens escaped his ingenius death trap and hunts the survivors down in the order of departure that they were supposed to be in.
I am assuming that you have seen this film (or are going to see it) because you like horror and not because some jerk boyfriend or freaky girlfriend is going to drag you to see it. In that case, we can forget the question of “is it scary?” and head to the meat of the film: the deaths. The appeal of watching any of the links in the Final Destination chain is that the setup for each cannon fodder teen’s demise is an elaborate, dark contraption reminiscent of some diabolical version of the board game “Mouse Trap.” The more creative, the better. Not that I am advocating torture and death as acceptable (though the killing off of two bimbettes in tanning beds is grimly funny), but in the context of these films it is obviously intended to be dark humor. Final Destination 1 had its plane crash and Final Destination 2 had its interstate pile-up. Here, we have a haywire roller coaster and yes, people get flung off. There’s a guy who dies by weight lifting and those tanning bed chicks I mentioned awhile ago. Need I continue? It gets mind-numbingly entertaining when you consider the fact that these kids know that the Grim Reaper is after them and still place themselves in stupid situations like operating a nail gun and skill saw. The film is as entertaining as a dumb kid who touches the stove even when his mom tells him not to.
If you’ve seen the first two, you will not be disappointed. If you’re new to all this, you’ll either be terribly offended or guiltfully amused.
Final Destination 3: Not as fresh as Saw, but more entertaining than Hostel.

Player 2: DrSpengler

If there is any horror franchise that could conceivably continue onward into the distant future, it is Final Destination. The concept is fresh, unchallenged by knock-offs (so far, anyway) and so long as the sequels fulfill the requirements of the franchise, you’re guaranteed an intensely entertaining horror film. Maybe nothing that will ever escalate to “classic”-status, but something fun, gory, surprising, intriguing and satisfying all the way around.
The concept of the Final Destination franchise is constant through-out all the films; a group of people survive a horrible demise because one of the would-be corpses foresees the event, freaks out, and accidentally saves them all. However, you can’t cheat death no matter how hard you try, and one-by-one the survivors perish in gruesome, ironic “accidents” in the exact order in which they would have died earlier. And in the case of Final Destination 3, a group of annoying teenagers survive a nightmarish rollercoaster fiasco only to fall prey to Death-itself shortly afterward.
The concept is interesting enough, but that’s not what makes these movies so entertaining. It’s the WAY these people die that either shocks the crap out of you or leaves you in stitches. The deaths rely on a series of coincidences to cause more coincidences which eventually end with the designated teenager meeting a spectacularly painful demise. The coincidences build-up and build-up, for minutes at a time, leaving you hooked to see how one affects the other. The only comparison that can be made is to a Rube Goldberg Device. You know, like when a bowling ball falls onto a scale, the scale tips and the elevating tray taps the tail of one of those drinking toy birds, the bird dips into a bowl of water, the ripple causes a tiny toy sailboat to float to the end of the bowl and bump into a piece of cheese that was sitting on the table, the cheese falls to the floor where it intrigues a mouse, the mouse goes to the cheese but also has rabies and bites you in the leg on its way toward the cheese. Then on your way to the doctor you get hit by a semi.
Something like that only way cooler with ten times the gore and violence.
And Final Destination 3 provides lots of gore. I don’t want to ruin too much for you, but the brutality of the deaths surpass those in the first two films. Particularly what happens to the roid-raging black dude. In your FACE!
As far as a grade is concerned, on The Relative Grading Scale of Inappropriate Cartoon Snowmen, a BAD grade would be…ohhh…”Slushy the Slush-Packer”. However, since this was a GOOD movie, it rates a “Frosty the Pedophile”.
So if you want to see a horror movie that fits all the criteria to be entertaining, but isn’t anything that’ll make the history books, then check this movie out. It’s original (or as original as a sequel can get), gory and very fun to watch.

Exercising With Emily Rose

Exorcism is one of those delightful dinner-table subjects that the whole family can enjoy. It is also one of the most widely misunderstood and ridiculed subjects in the post-modern world, incompatible with today’s notions of civilized society. Many television specials have covered “live” exorcisms performed by ministers and self-proclaimed healers on supposedly possessed people who, to the intelligent viewer, are simply histrionics, epileptics, or outright crazies. It makes religion, and Christianity in particular, look stupid.
The problem with exorcism is at its core rooted in where to start. Do we look at exorcisms performed by Presbyterians? Methodists? Buddhists? To gauge the validity of exorcism, people tend to be aversed to look at the source: Roman Catholicism, which has been the crowd-pleaser and leader of mainstream concepts of exorcism since 33 A.D. With the Ritual Romanum in hand, the Catholic Church has set the standard on performing exorcisms with meticulous precision. Protestantism has since developed its own fractured forms of diabolical removal but without the flare or authority that the world sees in Rome.
A brief understanding of Catholic exorcism is necessary to appreciate the movie from a more precise perspective: Catholic exorcisms are rarely performed relative to the days of old and are not implemented unless the supposed possessee has passed a review by medical examiners ruling out a conventional, medically sound answer to explain the person’s behavior. This includes strange acquisition of foreign languages, vomiting of alien objects, contortions, and supernatural levitations. That is when the holy water comes out. No exorcism is allowed to be filmed or sensationalized, which is one reason why you never see Catholic exorcisms on Dateline (and one reason why most people think that the Church has something to hide). The Church intriguingly merges theology and science in its combat of demonic forces and provides a very positive opportunity for science to step in.
Which is the prime reason for why The Exorcism of Emily Rose is such a success. Part courtroom drama, part horror movie, part educational, and all suspenseful, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a carefully filmed movie that takes a provocative and thoughtful look at exorcism while still taking subtle cheap-shots at trying to scare the crap out of you. The story is loosely based on the case of Anneliese Michel, a German girl who did not survive a Catholic exorcism and whose exorcists and parents faced jail time for negligent homicide (prompting the Catholic Church to put even stricter regulations on its physician verification prior to performed exorcisms). The events in the movie take great liberties with the actual tale but that’s not really the point: the point is the present to us, the viewer, a fictionalized exorcism in as “true to life” a view as possible by clever use of flashbacks, replays, and scientific evidence (or counter-evidence).
The movie only slows down, ironically, when it feels the need to provide an even-handed point of view from the “exorcisms are crap!” and “exorcisms are some real sh*t!” crowds. How does it manage? Well, you throw in some shots of Father Tom Wilkinson seeing a shadowy fellow who may be the devil. Then you throw in some shots of the prosecutor being a complete ass. Then let’s have the hot lawyer start sensing something amiss in her apartment at 3:00 a.m. Then let’s show the prosecutor… well, keep being an ass. And so forth and so on.
But this volley of the spirtual versus the religious, faith versus rationality, and where they interact is what makes the movie so enjoyable from both a random viewer and intrigued religious perspective. We are finally shown Linda Blair unmasked and on trial, exposed and vulnerable. And at the same time, we find ourselves prey to the old addage: “if you cannot show them God, show them the Devil.”
Grade: B+