Do we always need a sequel???

Sometimes a squeal is necessary, but the Final Destination franchise should’ve stopped at one.

Jiana Woods, Staff

While we are waiting for spring to arrive, nothing really beats staying inside and watching a good movie. But for right now, I’m going to focus on the movies that came out after that first good movie. The movies that no one really asked for but we still ended up getting.  Now, not all sequels are bad, but the “Final Destination” movies are not just your every day sequel.

The first “Final Destination” movie was okay, it wasn’t anything to rave about, more so just something to help the time go by.

“Final Destination” is a movie about a guy named Alex Browning who has a prophetic dream about the airplane that his French class is on going up in flames. Once he wakes up and realizes that the plane is actually going to explode, he causes a huge scene resulting in him, five students, and one teacher–all in total seven people–getting removed from the plane.

But, the real drama begins while they are all sitting in the airport: they actually see the plane explode and they all become scared of Alex because his dream actually come true. This means that they all escaped death… or so they thought.

But if someone interfered with another person’s death, then death skipped that person and went to the next, but no matter whether they interfered or not, “death” would continue to make its rounds until they were all dead.

The movie wasn’t horrible, but there were a few parts with bad writing and the movie included scenes that just didn’t make any sense, but it was still worth seeing if one was bored. But, I couldn’t make it through the next four “Final Destination” movies. Of the next four movies, I watched one. That one being “Final Destination 2,” and oh brother, that movie stunk.

“Final Destination 2” came out three years after “Final Destination.” The two movies have the same premise, but the lead this time is a woman named Kimberly Corman. Her and three friends are on their way to Daytona Beach, but there’s a huge pileup on the highway and they all die.

The End.

 Not really, it turns out like the first one it’s a dream, so what does she do? She takes it upon herself and blocks off the entrance onto that highway and proceeds to get out her car. That’s when we meet the cute cop who’s trying to defuse the situation. But as he’s doing that, the pileup takes place and a car comes crashing into her car killing all her friends.

But what takes the cake is how unnecessarily gory the “Final Destination” movies became after the first film. There’s one scene where it’s obvious that they’re running low on time in the scene because around three people die within 20 minutes. One lady gets her head ripped off by an elevator, another gets stabbed through her eye by a huge PVC pipe, and a man gets dismembered by a flying strip of barb wire after another unnecessary explosion.

That’s how odd their deaths were, not even me, the self-proclaimed oddest person in our school, could understand their deaths. Now, I know that’s the premise of the movies is that after they avoid death they all die in an implausible way, but this is a whole new level of weird. Not even the deaths in the first movie were this inconceivable.

Now, I know this statistic to me is really shocking apparently, “Final Destination” had a budget of 23 million U.S. dollars and it made 112.9 million U.S. dollars in box office. “Final Destination 2” had a 26 million U.S. dollars budget and made 90.4 million U.S. dollars in box office. For the first movie, it makes sense, but for the second movie, they might have used 10 million for the cameras and other equipment and, three million just for fake blood and guts alone, and then pocketed the rest.

Now, what makes more sense with the sequels is that sometimes they change directors. But oddly the first four movies flip flop back and forth between the directors of the first and second movies. In some cases that alone can really ruin a franchise, but in a few cases, it can be beneficial to the franchise. Sadly, the “Final Destination” franchise it got the latter of the two.

It’s like including a random love scene in horror movies and you’re kinda confused as to why they let it stay in the final cut of the film. Blood and guts for me can kinda ruin a film, but sometimes it can be tasteful. I personally don’t want to see someone’s small intestine every 20 minutes.

The views in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of the GENESIS staff. Reach Jiana Woods at [email protected].