Dead Again

Let's start with two raves and a beef. Final Destination 2 is a tight, rockin' popcorn flick packed with nasty kicks. It's also a rare beast, a second horror-franchise installment that matches and in some ways supersedes the original (unlike such sputterings as Jaws 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2, The Fly II, Leprechaun 2... got a spare day for the whole list?) The gripe, however, is that the producers of the first film, cowed by lackluster test-marketing, reshot and recut their movie, sparing protagonist Devon Sawa a noble demise while snuffing a much more intriguing conclusion. Box-office money talks, and you can't please everyone, but when the sequel begins, he's already dead from an absurd "accident," so what exactly was the point?

Fortunately for discerning B-movie junkies, director David R. Ellis (Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco) doesn't give a damn, though he and screenwriters J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress do find an inventive way to tie everything together. Immediately distinguishing his work from the stylized moodiness of the first film's director (and X-Files exec producer), James Wong, Ellis giddily buries plot loopholes and the premise's essential silliness by giving the people an extra helping of what they seem to want: a crock of shocks.

Herein, a new gaggle of potentially marketable relative unknowns narrowly avoids catastrophe -- this time not a jet explosion but a flaming traffic pileup -- only to have death pick them off one by one via a plethora of makeshift, lethal, Rube Goldbergesque contraptions, rather than, say, lightning. The gist is that if death misses you the first time, it'll come back for you when you're behaving stupidly in a place full of dangerous things. It's Jackass with closure.

Much like Jamie Lee Curtis' character obligingly slumming through Halloween: Resurrection, sole surviving heroine Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) returns from pallid asylum loitering to talk tough and confront her grimly reaping old foe. She and cheekily grotesque mortician Mr. Bludworth (Candyman's Tony Todd, also returning) basically spew informative exposition about "death's design" to puzzled audiences and the fresh meat. The latter group includes perky new heroine Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) and son and mother Tim and Nora Carpenter (James Kirk -- hold your Trek-isms -- and Lynda Boyd).

Final Destination 2 immediately speeds us into the fray via a televised talk show commemorating the anniversary of the first movie's tragedy. Soon enough, good girl Kimberly and her horny, druggie friends hit the road for Florida, which is rather ambitious considering that they're obviously in British Columbia and not the film's suggested Long Island, New York, setting. Simultaneously confirming the Canadian connection and plunging our hapless leads into mayhem, a heavily laden logging truck flips out, and cars and (happily) SUVs are violently destroyed, with people dying in horrible but cleverly directed ways.

What's the joy of watching these folks die? Well, apart from the giggles of observing their "safety" powwow in a room laden with large spears and a pointy, perilously suspended kayak, the groove is not unlike a slick, preposterous slasher movie, minus the slasher part. In this fantasy, it's darkly amusing to watch caricatured players strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage... and then being heard no more.