If a good gimmick doesn’t make for a good movie, then it can make for a sequel, if not a slew of sequels, or a franchise if a film maker feels prolific. Either way, horror fans like you and me will at least check our sources out of morbid curiosity if nothing else.

I liked the first Final Destination, absurd as it was at turns. I know logically that sequels to most movies, even good ones, tend to suck. Do I listen to me when I see Final Destination 2 on TV? Does the slutty bimbo in any horror movie not opt to go down to the basement of doom? You, faithful readers, know the answer as well I did when I changed the channel.

To the movie’s credit, it wasn’t bad. It followed the same basic story as the first. Our hero has a strong premonition of a catastrophic accident and uses that knowledge to save him/herself as well as anyone else they can from death. However, since Death was cheated out of souls, s/he comes back to claim them.

Once again, Death takes the Rube Goldberg approach and each death scene is more absurd and complicated than the first, right down to a big barbeque grill explosion. In a way, the specter of Death is the perfect slasher movie villain. S/he has no real identity other than a personified version of death itself. S/he can kill you in any way possible, no matter how ridiculous the scenario, and since s/he’s Death itself, s/he can’t be killed, or even put down for a short time, such as Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers or Freddy Kreuger. As the movie progresses, the viewer can see that Death truly can’t be outwitted either, despite the best efforts of the protagonists, even protagonists with prior knowledge of cheating death such as Clear Waters (Ali Larter: Final Destination). What I don’t understand is why Death takes his or her sweet time and kill them off one by one not unlike Michael Myers or his contemporaries after making a big production of creating catastrophes to take out a large group of people.

Overall, it was a decent continuation of the original story. The acting was solid, but the best performance came from Tony Todd, who seemed to relish his small role as the creepy, evasive, but knowledgeable mortician that enjoys his line of work way too much. A perverted little part of me hopes that he is featured in the sequels as not only the mortician, but as Death personified, fucking with the cannon fodder all along. You have to admit, the series could benefit from such a twist. Elaborate and absurd ways to kill off unsuspecting and shell shocked people can get formulaic after awhile.