Movie review: Final Destination 5 ***

Stars: Nicholas D'Agosto, Emma Bell, David Koechner
Director: Steven Quale
Rated: R
Showing: Speciality Cinema week of Friday, August 26 – daily 9:15pm except Sunday 7:00pm. For more information about film times, call 292-2135.
Runtime: 92 minutes
Horror/thriller

Call me fickle, but while I loathe the dismal sadism of the Saw movies, the Final Destination series, in which attractive young people are killed in equal numbers and equally graphic detail, is one of my guilty pleasures.

The Final Destinations are better made, they're brimming with suspense and surprise, and the tone is dark-hearted mischief, not cruelty. The fatalities are too ludicrous to be offensive.

Steven Quale, James Cameron's second-unit director, makes a solid feature directing debut in the fifth installment. He wisely concentrates on staging imaginative mayhem and doesn't try to make the film carry more dramatic weight than it can support.

There's nothing revolutionary in screenwriter Eric Heisserer's script, but luckily the story is only a tiny part of the FD experience.

Once again we follow a handful of attractive folks who were fated to die in a disaster but escape thanks to a warning premonition by one of the survivors. Death, who doesn't like to miss his quota, reclaims them one by one through a succession of freak accidents involving everyday objects.

Over the previous four films, characters have snuffed it in just about every manner except falling into a box full of mouse traps. The set-ups for each date with doom turn every electrical connection, loose screw and cup of water on the set into a potential assassin. Just try not to giggle when you're watching out for malicious tea kettles and sinister desk fans.

Final Destination 5 combines swell surprise nods to its predecessors (including a humdinger of a finale) with new, fiendishly inventive deathtraps.

After avoiding a suspension bridge collapse, Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) and Molly (Emma Bell) slowly realize that the Grim Reaper has come calling for them. Tony Todd returns as the continuing character Coroner Bludworth, appearing at each accident site with dour warnings about death's invincibility.

David Koechner (Anchorman's nitwit sportscaster) has some nifty comic moments as the paper company boss whose employees are being supernaturally terminated, and P.J. Byrne is aptly cast as a galling junior exec. Most of the cast is colorless nullities who are simply hanging around to be eliminated.

Those exits are imagined with icky ingenuity and brash bad taste. I won't tell you about the sailboat mast or the eyeball or the flying tire except to praise the thought and craftsmanship that went into making the audience cringe and groan and giggle simultaneously.