BEFORE: Down to two films before I head out of town - I got two paychecks, made a credit card payment, and now I just have to pack, which I'll do in five minutes right after writing this review. There were a few ways to get HERE, so that makes watching this series, sort of...inevitable? And I think the whole film series is about inevitability, the inevitability...of DEATH. The final curtain, the big sleep, the reckoning, the end of everything, it's coming for all of us, even if we don't know when. I mean, really, would you want to know? They ran these on cable like six months ago, while I was in the prep mode for the horror chain, so yeah, why not grab them all and burn them to DVD? That just saves time down the road. And even after I get through this series, I'll still have miles to go before I sleep - assuming I can sleep after watching all these horror movies.
Devon Sawa carries over from "Black Friday". I already figured out that there's no direct linking through this entire series, BUT if you're a horror movie fan and you know that there's SORT OF a through line here, but in order to pull it off I have to kind of toggle between two different horror franchises. Perhaps you've already guessed what I'm going to do in the final week of October, but if not, we'll sort it all out when I get back from North Carolina.
THE PLOT: After getting a premonition about a plane crash on his school trip, Alex, a student, saves a few of his classmates. However, their situation gets complicated when death starts chasing them.
AFTER: Well, this film is about traveling, and I'm trying not to read too much into that, when I'm about to go on a trip. Thank God we're not flying to North Carolina, I would probably consider that to be bad luck shortly after watching this movie. Alex is flying to Paris on a school trip, and suddenly he gets a premonition/dream/vision about the plane exploding, and friends and teachers and complete strangers all getting sucked out of the hole in the side of the plane, and then the whole thing exploding. But he wakes up right before take-off, and things start playing out just like they did in his dream. Two girls ask him to switch seats, he notices a broken part of his tray table, it's all happening, therefore the plane's going to explode, too.
He panics and he gets disruptive, of course, while trying to warn everyone about the impending disaster, his friends try to calm him down and his rival tries to fight him, leading all of them to get removed from the plane. One teacher volunteers to stay behind, too, and sort out the ruckus with the airline and try to get those kids on to a later plane to France. But just then, the plane is not far away after take-off, and everyone sees it explode. Just like his dream, so umm, people now want to know HOW he knew. Sure, there would be questions, the FBI would take an interest in a teenager who had some knowledge before-hand that a plane would blow up, like did he have a hand in bringing that about, or did he hear or see anything before that might have caused it?
(By the way, the plane here is a Boeing, but this was years before the company developed a reputation for either making shoddy planes or not performing the proper upkeep on them, I think it was a few years ago that Boeing planes were breaking down and crashing on the regular, I know I didn't take a plane anywhere for a few years, my wife was already very afraid to fly places, though she's been known to make exceptions if we're on our way to a cruise or Vegas. To be specific, there was a run of Boeing crashes in 2018-2019, then there was like a 20-month suspension of the 737 Max, then the pandemic happened, and hardly anyone was flying anywhere for a while.)
There were seven people who left the plane, and after the memorial services for the other students and teachers, strange accidents start happening to those seven people. Alex's best friend, Tod, slips on a puddle of water in his bathroom and falls into the tub, with a clothes line wrapped around his neck, strangling him. While this accident is ruled a suicide, we the audience know that it was an accident - and when Alex and the others sneak into the funeral home to prove it, they meet the weird creepy mortician who tips them off that by surviving, they have disrupted Death's plan and for balance to be achieved, the people who were meant to die in the plane explosion are not fated to die very soon. The survivors get together at a cafe to exchange information, and they argue over the unlikeliness of this, to the point where one leaves quickly and is run over by a speeding bus.
(This has become, over time, a very quick and easy and nearly comic way to get rid of a character fast, just have a bus run them down, and you can even do that quite cheaply with special effects, no need to even show us a body or blood or anything gross, just have that blur of a bus go by, and you have one less character to write dialogue for. It's almost become like the punchline to a joke now.)
Alex spends way too much time watching the news, researching the details of the plane explosion, and learning how it happened, at least from a scientific angle. He somehow learns that the survivors are dying in the same order they WOULD have died in, had they remained in their seats and if the scene he caused hadn't gotten them ejected from the plane. This quickly devolves into a guessing game of what the "rules" are for this, and much debate over what they should do next. Hey, I'm all for never leaving the house again, I mean your social life will be in the crapper because there's no zoom calls or online gaming yet, but hey, at least you'll be alive. But Alex determines that the teacher, Ms. Lewton, is next on the list to die, so he races over to her house, only to find that she's been killed in a bizarre chain-reaction incident in her own kitchen, she was drinking vodka from a broken mug and some spilled on to her computer monitor, which made it short-circuit and explode. The shrapnel cut her, then while she was trying to clean herself up, she slipped on the spilled alcohol while her whole kitchen caught on fire, and then finally a set of kitchen knives got knocked on to her. No, wait, finally her whole house blew up, so yeah, Death really really wanted her to die, it looks like, and pulled out every trick to make it happen. Really, one of these things is an accident, but ALL of them seems malicious. The way that the oven exploded, causing the chair to tip over and push the knife into her chest seemed a bit too much like a deadly Rube Goldberg device, though.
The survivors learn that if they interfere with the weird accidents, like if Alex gets there in time to save someone, the "curse" then skips that person and moves on to the next survivor in the original intended death order. Football star Carter parks his car on the train tracks to prove the theory wrong, and, well, bad idea because all of a sudden he can't start the car or open the locked doors or even break the windows to get out. But Alex intervenes and pulls him from the car, saving his life for the second time. So Carter is safe for now, but the car is wrecked, then the passing train kicks up a piece of shrapnel from the ground that decapitates Billy, who was next on the list. Alex manages to save Clear in a similar fashion, and when they believe that the danger has passed, one year later Alex and Clear and Carter all finally make it to Paris, believing that they are free from the curse. Ah, but they find they could be very much mistaken.
Now, over time, the life expectancy of everything is zero - so you really can't prove that there is a malicious entity trying to kill these teenagers, but for the sake of the story, it's what the movie wants you to believe. We've had similar "curses" in pop culture, like so many people from the movies "Poltergeist" and "Superman" died in tragic ways that people used to say that those movies were almost certainly cursed. There were four actors from the 1982 movie "Poltergeist" who died within a few years of the movie being released - Dominique Dunne, Julian Beck, Will Sampson, and Heather O'Rourke all passed away by 1988. But you can't really say that they died BECAUSE they were in that movie, or that it's not just a run of bad luck, health problems being unpredictable as they are, and one was a victim of domestic violence. Besides, the film's two biggest stars, JoBeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson, are still alive. Another cast member died in 2009, but that was at least 11 years after the others. Who decides how long the "curse" lasts and when someone's death is just a coincidence?
I say, if you're looking at coincidences, there's a bunch of John Denver music played in this film, and you hear "Rocky Mountain High" being played in the airport before the students board the plane, and then the song is played later in the film as well. It's notable because John Denver also died in a plane crash, so if there is such a thing as "luck", then maybe it's bad luck to hear a John Denver song before getting on a plane? I mean, who can say, why take the chance and tempt fate by indulging in John Denver music, and if you really have to, make sure it's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" and not that other song. I mean, people who work in theaters are superstitious about saying the word "MacBeth" behind the scenes, they tend to say "The Scottish Play" instead, maybe "Rocky Mountain High" is something like that? Or maybe it really was John Denver who killed these people, not Boeing or Death. Just a thought.
I had an experience once where I was late getting to the airport and I missed a flight to Portland, Oregon. I stupidly took the bus, which got stuck on the Long Island Expressway. I did arrive in time to watch them close the plane doors and take off, and I had to take a later flight. I kind of consoled myself by thinking, "Hey, what if I missed that flight and that plane ends up crashing?" That would mean the situation wasn't all that bad, I was going to get to the conference in Portland a day late, but at least I'd still be alive. So there's always two ways to look at everything, right? But if you're afraid to fly on airplanes, maybe this film will confirm everything you believe about the danger of that.
But then again, even if you manage to escape the certain death of a plane crash, that means that by interfering with Death's plan, the so-called natural order of things, you're now being targeted for death via some unusual or unlikely or ridiculous method. Now you can't leave the house, you can't go skydiving or snowboarding or even cross the street, because you'll die for sure one of these days. I think we can all be significantly scared by the prospect that we're all going to die one day, yet still we don't really want to go out of our way to over-protect ourselves to make sure that TODAY is not that day. We (most of us, anyway) want to live our lives free and without fear, and tell ourselves that we're going to live a very long time and die peacefully in our sleep, surrounded by loved ones. Well, you keep hoping and keep believing that if it gets you through the day. Still, you may want to be a LITTLE more careful on a daily basis, OK?
NITPICK POINT: I thought the captions were wrong when it kept referring to one of the characters by the name "Clear". I was sure that somebody was misspelling "Claire" because who the hell is named "Clear"? "Clear Rivers" is the absolute fakest name of a character I've ever heard. This really messes with my ability to suspend disbelief. "CLEAR"? It makes no sense.
This film cost only $23 million to make (in year 2000 dollars) and grossed over $112 million worldwide. That's the kind of success that creates a sequel, or in this case, a whole bunch of sequels. I've got time for one of them before we have to drive down South tomorrow.
Directed by James Wong (producer of "Black Christmas")
Also starring Ali Larter (last seen in "Varsity Blues"), Kerr Smith, Kristen Cloke (last seen in "Black Christmas"), Daniel Roebuck (last seen in "Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London"), Roger Guenveur Smith (last seen in "Riff Raff"), Chad E. Donella (last seen in "Knox Goes Away"), Seann William Scott (last seen in "Jackpot!"), Tony Todd (last seen in "John Candy: I Like Me"), Amanda Detmer (last seen in "Big Fat Liar"), Brendan Fehr (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy"), Forbes Angus (last seen in "Agent Cody Banks"), Lisa Marie Caruk (last seen in "Snakes on a Plane"), Christine Chatelain (last seen in "Chaos Theory"), Barbara Tyson (last seen in "Pacific Heights"), Robert Wisden (last seen in "Legends of the Fall"), P. Lynn Johnson (last seen in "An Unfinished Life"), Larry Gilman, Mark Holden, Marrett Green (last seen in "I, Robot"), Fred Keating (last seen in "Shooter"), John Hainsworth, Nicole Robert (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), Kristina Matisic, Dustin Brooks, Alessandro Juliani (last seen in "Needle in a Timestack"), Leslie McMichael, Natasha Morley, Troy Yorke.
RATING: 5 out of 10 boarding passes
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