For teachers, it’s retirement party season.  My former colleagues are fun and interesting people, so the party was a good time.  It’s comforting to be home and drunk by 5 pm, like back in the good ol’ days.  I used to attend the Friday Happy Hour about once per month.  When I got home, I wasn’t good for much, so would cut the grass for a few hours and try not to drive into the creek.

It’s been raining for two days, and will probably rain for two more, so that routine is out.

The new Final Destination movie is getting good reviews for being dumb fun, so Sparky and I are going to watch it.  I don’t recall watching any of them, so figured I should start at the beginning.  Turns out there isn’t much prior knowledge needed for any of the movies.

Final Destination (2000) is supposed to involve high school seniors, but the characters all seem 4 or 5 years older and act like caricatures of young adults.  Don’t watch these movies for the plot, acting or dialogue.  The characters aren’t very likable or relatable.  That may be intentional.

These movies are in the horror/thriller genre, but can be enjoyed as dark comedies.  The clumsy foreshadowing, incoherent death force, and outlandish manner in which people die, are just too funny.  Since the characters are one-dimensional, not very appealing, and almost everyone dies, when it happens, there is no emotional weight.

Some of the deaths occur after an unlikely sequence of events.  Dripping water from a leaky pipe usually means somebody gonna die.  The movies play with this idea, where a sequence of actions look like a character is going to bite the dust, then the person steps aside or ducks, and it doesn’t.  That was close.  Then the character gets hit by a truck.  I don’t know, it may seem odd, but I laughed several times.

For a movie in the horror genre, it isn’t very horrific.  When someone dies, it’s quick, decisive and ludicrous.  There is no lingering suffering or torture porn.  I’d find that difficult to watch. 

The movie, Jaws, was chilling because sharks exist and are already scary.  In Final Destination movies, the end may come from something that is scary, like a roller coaster, but it’s absurd.  A movie like Poltergeist deals with the supernatural, but in a way that is unsettling when you are alone in the dark.  In these movies, death is a vague, calculating force that may not even be an entity.  Death has no coherent operating principles.

The Final Destination movies are silly, and good for movie night with friends who appreciate dark humor or a distracting beagle who wants to goof around.