Reviews

I could quickly tell there was something very false about this movie, and even just the first few minutes of dialog were so fake and contrived they were hard to stomach. The situations are laughably improbable, the sets are grotesquely overdone, the lighting is comical, and the soundtrack is beyond annoying. My revulsion has nothing to with the gay storyline (I myself am gay); this film is just a monumentally underdone, underacted pile of nothing. If it had been in any theater, it surely would have closed after one night and emptied the auditorium well before the halfway mark.

It's not worth seeing even as a curiosity. DON'T waste your time!

As others have mentioned, the dialog was a real obstacle at times -- I couldn't even tell if the dockside conversation at the end was English or Gaelic. In most any other film, this would have had me at the point of surrender before reaching even the halfway point. But the story shines through here. And while parts are admittedly improbable or inaccurate, this didn't distract one bit. In the shocking final newsreel scene, I was just as distraught as Hatosy's character -- I replayed the scene at least 10 times, each time quite undone its emotional wallop.

High marks to Hatosy, Dyer, and Inglesby, whose other work I will now purposefully seek out.

It's hard to explain why a movie so "bad" by ordinary measures remains a mesmerizing experience, and it's even harder to do it without spoilers. The uneven, wandering, genre-crossing plot is indeed bizarre, but often exquisitely so. The characters are all likable if seriously flawed. The odd story, the many interesting photographic vignettes, and some unique sequences that should not be divulged here, make this a worthwhile rental in spite of itself.

We've all seen similar menacing-monster effects before, but these have a peculiar rawness that sets them apart. (You can't really appreciate the complexity of a beast that seems to be mostly teeth-and-evil until you see it rendered.) Parts of the film are terrifying, and while there is a LOT of carnage, virtually all of it is filmed skillfully so that the Gasp Index is high, but flat-out gratuitous on-screen gore is minimal. I like that. Finally, after a short while one is always aware of a second layer of reality & telepathy that is executed well.

The user-ratings graph for this film is all over the place, so obviously not everyone reacts the same way. (I haven't seen such an inconclusive distribution since Blair Witch...)

I recommend seeing it on DVD for the alternate ending, which I preferred. It's much sadder, but less cheesy in that it forgoes the saved-at-the-last-second triteness of the final worm-squishing.

For some reason films set in New England are often loaded with geographical inaccuracies. Nobody in Maine would speak of driving south as going "toward Massachusetts" (which does not border Maine at all.) In the first scene that mentions the Quabbin Reservoir, it's said to be "not far" from the travelers' current position, which is presumably in southern Maine, and the dialog implies one could make the drive from one to the other in about 15 minutes. In reality it's over 100 miles. And much mention is made of a town called Derry, Maine, which does not exist but which is in fact the name of one of a well-known cluster of towns in southern New Hampshire, in an area very close to the part of Maine where this story takes place. Why this oddity was necessary I'll never know. If this seems like a small complaint, imagine how distracted you might be by a story set in a fictional Nevada town called Los Angeles, whose name was repeated several times per hour.

7/10

That really says it in a nutshell. The scenery and small-town vignettes are sweet in their own way but this movie really just affirms that some stars just can't make a bad movie. True, the accents in most of the characters (not all) are badly flawed.

One major goof -- SPOILER AHEAD -- and I would've submitted this in the "Goofs" section but it's empty right now and apparently you can't add to an empty category: Toward the end when a character dies a horrible death by falling through several hundred feet of rapids and waterfalls, we see a shot of the character's lifeless body. Anyone else who died in this violent manner would be bruised and bloodied, if not dismembered, by the ordeal, but there's not a scratch on this person's face. Ahem.

Overall rating (1-10) = 8

Scare factor (1-10) = 9+

Number of characters you sometimes just want to slap >1

First of all, comments seen here and elsewhere note that most of this movie's many scary moments are thoroughly preannounced, by swelling music and such. This is correct. Only a very few of the main fright points are done in "Jaws" style, i.e., sprung upon us when we can't help but be off-guard. Still, in my view, this doesn't detract much. This a VERY scary movie and a good investment if you like shock and surprise. I definitely *wouldn't* advise seeing it while holding a hot coffee or a fragile dessert.

That's not to say there's nothing in this film that detracts. First, what talent Michelle Pfeiffer has is largely wasted during the first hour on a script that's way too full of boomer-angst cliches. A big piece of the film's first half -- showing her character's daughter leaving for college and mom's resulting slushy reaction -- could have been easily condensed or evaporated, trimming several minutes from the total 129. If this was there to demonstrate what a good friend of mine likes to call EMS (Excessive Mom Syndrome) and to help confirm the idea that ole mom is even more delicate than she looks, then I suppose it worked. But so did several other shorter & simpler scenes, which sufficed. (At one point I heard a Valley-Girl sort of voice in the row behind me mutter, after a heavy sigh: "Okaaaaay, so she's wound a little too tight, we've *got* that already...." It was an accurate point. Somebody please wake me when this stock character type -- the artsy, wispy, idle, tormented, 40-ish upper-middle-class housewife with white teeth and a whiter Volvo -- breathes its last.

Some comments have also noted considerable over- and under-acting by both Ford and Pfeiffer. I agree. The mix of super-calm moments and shocker scenes, while effective, is jarringly uneven. I don't mean to imply that a horror/thriller film should always jolt us only at neat and regularly spaced intervals; but one could almost wonder if this film was divided into several parts at the beginning, each then being assigned to a separate director who rarely spoke with his or her collaborators. That said, I can't fault the *intensity* of any of the several pee-in-your-pants moments. As predictable and hollow as many of them are, each is a definite seat-grabber, and it would be hard to "spoil" any of them, even with a detailed verbal description.

The often-noted similarities to "Rear Window" are obvious, even too obvious, but *not* essential to the plot and in retrospect may seem gratuitous. Again, while the film may keep your mind engrossed and your breathing shallow, the overkill factor is high. Some of the camera or editing work seems overdone in the same way -- sometimes almost playfully so, and to such an extent that I can't really say for sure if the performers are guiltier there than the director.

For example, at one point about halfway through, a progressively more unnerved Claire [Pfeiffer] is inside her home peering intently at her neighbor's house, which we see in the predictable breathless pan from window to window, supposedly through her binoculars. When she finally sights Thorwald -- ooooooooops, I mean her neighbor Warren Feur -- we of *course* see his scowling face in a lightning-zoomed close-up with a loud blast of eerie music. and while this isn't done quite as badly as, say, the Large Marge eyeball-popper scene in "Pee-wee Herman's Big Adventure," it's in the same class when it comes to timing & soundtrack! It's quite a scary moment, but you might easily feel cheated by it soon afterward because (1) you realize that the zoom is a major part of what made the shot so scary, and (2) this Feur guy isn't really involved in the plot except to affirm, yet again, that Claire's a borderline basket case.

Miscellany: The film is set in Vermont, where I once lived, and I was pleased with some of the accuracies while also struck by some inaccuracies or improbabilities. None are really worth mentioning, except for the repeated mentions of the town of Adamant. Adamant is a real place in Vermont, but it's referred to at least twice in the script as being "down seven," meaning south on U.S. Highway 7 -- a main north-south thoroughfare, running the length of Vermont's western edge and traversing the Burlington/Lake Champlain area where the film's characters obviously live. But Adamant lies some 40 miles EAST of Route 7, a little over halfway across the state. It can't realistically be described as "down seven" from anywhere else in in Vermont or even Quebec, and in fact does not lie astride *any* numbered highway. (If the multiple mentions of this town's name are a new kind of "product placement" technique, I'd be interested to know the rationale for so thoroughly mislocating it!)

What happens *in* Adamant does have some bearing on the plot, but the town itself is not significant, or at least not significant enough to justify its quirky repetition. (If I missed something about this while making a quick visit to the john, someone please clue me in.)

Special effects: Not many, but those that we do see are quite good. No extraordinary innovations, just good scream-fuel.

Bottom line: It's scary and worth checking out. It's lame in spots and the story isn't all that new, but these things won't likely make you sad you went.

I agree with the many commenters here who rate Final Destination highly while conceding its lame script and painfully one-dimensional portrayals. Seems like every few minutes there was a line of dialog or plot device that made me want to roll my eyes. Yet the film still rattled me in the right places. It's very suspenseful despite several elements that just about anyone would find predictable or contrived. In the latter category (MILD SPOILER AHEAD), I was both entertained and embarrassed by the incredibly convoluted Rube-Goldberg-style buildup to almost every death or near-death. It's quite unrealistic that nobody dies *simply* in this film, but the whole premise of the story pretty well dismisses a requirement for realism anyway.