I don’t remember how I came across my copy of “April Fools Day” exactly, but it was part of a two pack and two sided DVD with the original “My Bloody Valentine.” One gets what they pay for and I didn’t pay very much for this set. If it was part of the horror movie grab bag from the Tower Record closeout years back (and I think it was), I paid next to nothing.

Either way, I was expecting a little more from a horror movie that built its premise around a holiday synonymous with pranks and practical jokes. You’d expect to see any and every manner of killer traps and jokes, right? Maybe a twist on the whoopee cushion? Maybe booby traps that would make early Wes Craven gems such as “Last House on the Left” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” seem a little tame? It is, after all a 1980’s slasher movie entitled, “April Fools Day.”

There were all the bad hair, fashions, soundtrack and gratuitous sex jokes and scenes that are part of that genre, but it did not deliver. Cute and perky Muffy St. John, played by Deborah Foreman, invites her college friends to her family estate located on a small island for Spring Break.

The trouble starts with a ferry accident, and shaken but still blase, maybe drunk or stoned given the performances of some of the actors, our scooby gang enters the estate, drink some top shelf booze and find little jokes like a dribble glass here, heroin supplies there and randomly scattered articles about accidents and the possibility that sweet Muffy may be a touch insane.The group dies off one by one, but in pretty ordinary ways.

I was expecting a gory twist on April Fools Day and not only did it fall short in that department, but the ending was all too inane and goofy. I will say that Amy Steel was a decent Final Girl, but she did a much better job in “Friday the Thirteenth: Part 2.” Overall, great gimmick and premise, but terrible follow through.

Welcome to another “It Came from the Queue” review. I came across the title “Cut” and the name, Molly Ringwald. My first thought was, could this be “Ducky’s Revenge” or some strange slash-tastic sequel to “The Breakfast Club?” I read Comcast’s synopsis and it looked to be the back drop to a true slasher movie, gimmick and all.

Hmmmm

It did not disappoint. Ringwald played a B- actress in a horror movie that was started at some point in the late 1980’s but never finished due to the untimely death of the nasty pitbull director, played by Kylie Minogue. Ringwald’s character, the pretty teenaged lead actress, and a P.A. witness an actor, recently fired slashing up the director with the garden tool weapon his killer character used and turning to attack them. Ringwald, panicked, manages to stick him in the neck and electrocute him.

One would think that the film would get a dose of bad publicity and higher box office sales due to morbid curiosity. It might have, if they were able to finish the film. Funny thing; anytime anybody tried to finish the movie, people got killed.

Twelve years later, the P.A. man went on to teach and a group of his students attempt to finish the movie as a final project. Traumatized, their instructor warns them against it, and sets the viewer up to the back story of the film as well as what happens to the hapless souls who try to finish it.

Do they listen? It is slasher movie land, so they get the rights to the film for next to nothing, hire Ringwald to play the mother of her teen character, and go back to the old set where a figure dressed as the movie killer hacks and slashes his way through the cast and crew, as well as a throwaway pervert character.

I liked it, formulaic as it was. It had a Crazy Ralph stock character who warned certain doom, coitus interruptus by sharp objects, and while the villain in of himself was generic and derivative, an interesting plot twist gave him a little extra dimension. All and all, this film stands strong on its own and the final scare can open up an interesting sequel.

When I first viewed the opening credits, one of my initial thoughts was, “this stars the guy in those commercials that steals your stuff when you fall asleep at your desk at 3:00?” My next thought was, “Nope-that’s Robert Goulet and Robert Vaughn played a bipolar public official on “Law and Order” and plugs a law firm.

All actors have to start somewhere. The camera first pans to a girls’ dormitory where a petite brunette packs a bag and looks over her shoulder, clearly about to run away. She is met by a friend, played by Nia Long, who gives the girl a switchblade for the journey ahead. After a few scares, shots of sleeping girls in various stages of undress and a shadow walking past, she finally makes a bid for freedom…and the hitchhiking, truck stops etc. that go with it.

Not to be! She is met by a mysterious man in what looks to be a Ronald Reagan mask, attacked and chased down a trap door, a rabbit hole if you would. She screams her way down the tube into a dark pit where she is dragged into a pit by our masked man, strapped into a straight jacket, even though she is fighting her solitary attacker and slowly but surely bricked into her little pit stall.

Enter a newly hired doctor by the name of Janet who suffers from strange hallucinations. She is starting her first day at her dream job working at a troubled girls’ clinic under a shrink named Gary, played by Mark E. Salomo-I mean, Robert Vaughn (he means business either way). She holds him in high regard and wants to please him right away.

Did I mention that she was blond and beautiful? If he wasn’t impressed by her credentials, he was all over her assets, as was the creepy assistant doctor, played by Donald Pleasence. If you thought that Pleasence was obsessed with Michael Myers to disturbing degrees in the Halloween movies, then you will be very creeped out by the way he follows Dr. Janet throughout the hospital grounds!

He does not turn out to be the only creepy admirer in Janet’s life, as the viewer will soon see, but the immediate problem for Janet is getting lost in the kitchen area. She bumbles in to find a group of tough, loud, and at many turns scantily dressed teenage girls looking her over as the new authority figure while grinding meat. Some girls bathe, do their hair, and primp in the kitchen as well. I can’t explain why the girls’ beauty rituals take place where food is prepared, but this is a mental hospital…

The girls’ while having a gang like mentality, are not above spats and fights among themselves. Janet walks into such a dispute, and raises the ire of the ringleader, Debbie, played by Ginger Lynn. Debbie starts a conflict with complaints of laziness, and blows it up to a full on brawl. One girl starts to garner delusions of persecution from the staff, other girls, and the beloved Dr. Gary.

A little mischief might be the norm, as this is a school for troubled girls, but going overboard, or not responding to Gary’s brand of therapy in the way he’d like has bad results for the patients. One is flayed by an electric beater as she uses it as a curling iron, and more find themselves bricked into pits, which turn out to be located in an underground basement area where some of the girls sneak boys, drugs and other party favors.

All the while, Janet asks Gary about the missing girls, harbors hallucinations of hands trying to break through a brick wall, accompanied by voices while being peeped and followed by Donald Pleasence. I, for one don’t need the job or the money that badly. However, she views Gary as a mentor, even when it looks like he is trying to undress her half the time. You really see how obsessed he gets when Debbie complains about Janet and threatens to have the rest of the girls boycott her science class focusing on ants. Gary thanks her for being honest to her face, but when Debbie sneaks out to meet a boy about some grass, trouble ensues. When Janet finally finds the tunnels and starts to see what kind of therapy Gary and staff have planned for the worst of the problem girls, rotting skulls and all, she’s in real trouble, especially after she turns down Gary’s marriage proposal.

I had fun with this movie, despite some of the plot holes. It did have a women in prison exploitation feel to it, especially with a shower initiation scene, but it had solid performances from Nia Long as the concerned friend who wasn’t going to know what was happening until the end. The standout performance was Donald Pleasence as patient experiment turned creepy staff. We all have that one coworker we’re never quite sure of, less so if that one has a crush on you! It touched on the fears of patient experimentation and being bricked into a small room within an enclave swarming with ants. I don’t think it was too faithful to Poe, but it was entertaining to watch, ants, electric mixers, presidential masks and all.

The best present one can give anybody is a DVD set of after school specials. I was fortunate to find such a set for my friend’s birthday one year.

For all the classics of the After School Special and Made for TV epics, the “Tough Girls” the “What are Friends Fors” or even the “Faces at the end of the Worlds,” there are those that might not make the cut, or the DVD sets shaped like a school bus starring those 70’s and 80’s sitcom staples.

I have a funny feeling that for all of its Made for TV madness and the small part of a young Helen Hunt as the younger and prettier, or at least thinner sister, The Spell is not going to get its own little short bus in those DVD sets of fond memory.

Horror movies touch upon our fears. The Spell touched upon a fear that haunts me well into adulthood. That fear is being the fat kid in the class. Our heroine, Rita, played by Susan Meyer and not really all that heavy, is picked on by her much thinner classmates. The beginning shots show these girls taunting Rita, puffing out their cheeks, trudging to mock her walk, which indicates Rita is trying especially hard to avoid these other girls.

It gets worse when she tries to climb the rope in gym class. The gym teacher shows more sympathy to Rita than her own sister, played by Helen Hunt. You really could see how Hunt was trying to fit in with the pretty girls….even when the worst of them falls from the top of the rope in an accident…

Soon, strange things start to happen to Rita’s family. She is found chanting, reading strange things, and after the sister starts being spiritually terrorized by among other things, an out of control clock, you start to get the feeling that Rita is using occult means to get even with mean classmates, a father who harps on her weight and generally acts like he would be much happier with only one daughter to a point where he wants to send her away and a sister who is equally mean and taking attention away from the one sympathetic parent Rita has…well, Mom is sympathetic until she figures out what Rita is up to and who she hangs out with at night anyway. Most moms would be wary of those occultists that keep their teenagers out late at night.

I can’t say I enjoyed this. Rita was not as awful as she was built up to be, as a matter of fact, it turned out a completely different person was doing the worst of the casting in a badly drawn surprise ‘twist.’ My guess was that the networks did not like the prospect of a vengeful and murderous teenager in the TV movies. No way would Carrie White have put up with that kind of nonsense in school or at home!

Welcome to another “It Came From the Queue” review. As mentioned, my free trial of Netflix afforded me a free double feature DVD of Prom Nights 3 and 4.

Boy, oh boy, was I glad that I received “Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil” as part of my free trial.

This particular sequel did not feature the Mary Lou Maloney character as the antagonist. This time around, our story begins in the late 1950’s as did the last two Prom Night movies. However, the prom queen isn’t burned in a freak accident. Two random prom goers meet, chat and decide to go to the boy’s car to…..play twenty questions! That’s what they were doing!

The villain of this story, as horror villains are wont to do, creep over to the People About To Have Sex, the characters that you know are going to get killed first. Is the villain a spurned lover? A runner up to Prom Queen that wants the title? A hopeful Prom King who never had his moment in the sun or his fifteen minutes in the last movies?

If you guessed none of the above, then you would be right.

The specter is a local priest that headed to Hamilton High’s Prom to seek out and ultimately kill couples engaging in sexual activity. He manages to find teenagers doing just that, so Father Jonas (James Carver) stabs and slashes before anyone engaged in premarital sex.

When his church finds out what he did, they do not call the police. They do not call the Vatican. They drug him, and keep him, stigmata and all, imprisoned in a basement. This church entrusts one priest to watch over Jonas as though he contained the Lost Ark.

Fast forward to the year 1991 where a young priest is informed that he is not going on his planned mission to Africa. It turns out that Father Jonas’s keeper dies of old age and Jonas, who is still imprisoned and alive, needs a new priest to give him his happy shot in between masses.

No one thought to call the cops, even after thirty some odd years. This blew my mind throughout the movie.

The young priest forgets to give Jonas his shot, and Jonas, even though he is probably a junkie at this point, manages to not only wake up, but has the strength to free himself and strangle this other priest who is much younger and with it than Jonas. I don’t know much of anything about stigmata, but I don’t think it prevents withdrawl or gives the afflicted that kind of super strength.

One can’t help but wonder the kind of scandal that would have ensued. The movie does not touch upon that. I bet if they did, and skipped the current batch of prom goers, there would have been a better movie. I digress.

Free to wreak havoc all over any teenagers that dare to screw around, Jonas then follows two couples that skip the prom to go to a cabin house belonging to the parents of one of the cannon fodder, I mean teenagers. From there, we see everything from obscene phone calls to the theft of wine that ‘was worth more than the house’ to misplaced girlfriends to our villain stabbing a kid about to film his big brother having sex with a metal crucifix, all leading to the big chase scene of the last surviving good girl survivor (Nicole de Boer) to an abandoned shed in the house and an explosion, ending the evil priest once and for all…..so you think!

I wasn’t impressed, or scared. There was little gore or even violence shown. The story was weak and the performances were sub-par. It wasn’t even so bad it was funny. It was a very poor movie, even for a bad franchise sequel.

This review is the first of my “It came from the Queue” reviews. These stem from the free trial stage of my Netflix account. I had a month of freebies, and I was not going to use it wisely. “Prom Night IV: Deliver us from Evil” came as a double feature DVD. My God, I could rent two for the price of one….sort of.

I didn’t mind Prom Night III. It didn’t have much in the way of scare factor or much gore, but the story is one you’re interested in following and there was solid if not a little over the top acting, funny lines, and even a star turn from Jeremy Ratchford of “Cold Case” fame as the stereotypically nerdy and schedule obsessed Leonard.

The bad girl Prom Queen of Hamilton High, Mary Lou Maloney (Courtney Taylor) tries to make another go at claiming her title of Queen of the Prom. There is only one problem; she is stuck in hell. As the title credits roll, you get to see Mary Lou’s hell. Hell is a dirty dingy version of Hamilton High in 1957 with a few neon lights and a dance floor that is hot to the touch. You see dead girls dancing, or just shambling in place with an occasional “Ouch!” in bare feet. Mary Lou, in a blue dress and strategically burned somehow has supernatural powers at her disposal. She manages to coax the school janitor back in the world of the living to a jukebox that appears out of nowhere. It turns out that he was a classmate of Mary Lou in 1957, and he recognizes her voice before he is electrocuted by the jukebox giving her a gate back to the living world, where she is also endowed with otherworldly magic.

You’d think that such a powerful demon Prom Queen on a mission would render gory results on the night of the prom.

Not so! The gore is at a minimum in this Prom Night sequel. She can make food stands, salon chairs that drip battery acid and a football drill appear as if by magic, but somehow, the cartoon effects are very tame. By the time she knocks off the school guidance counselor in the salon chair of battery acidic doom with the line, “you’re nails look terrible. Let me help you with that!” I thought I was watching a live action episode of “Looney Tunes”. Mary Lou even had an array of costumes at her disposal from Soda Shoppe girl to naughty nurse giving her more of a Bugs Bunny persona.

What she didn’t have was a means to dispose of the bodies. Enter Alex (Tim Conlon) an aspiring doctor second string football player, band member and overall ‘average’ guy right down to his height and shoe size, according to him and the statistics he read to his long suffering girlfriend, Sarah. Not long after the resurrection of Mary Lou and the school gymnasium in an elaborate ceremony by Hamilton’s new principal, Alex gets the bright idea to study for a big biology test late at night, hours after the school closes. Study time is interrupted by Mary Lou, who despite Alex’s average height, shoe size and according to the guidance counselor, grades, seduces and ultimately falls for him, killing off faculty and students that stand in the way of his being both a pre-med student and star football player while doctoring his grades and endowing him with athletics.

And all he has to do in return is meet her at school late at night and bury a couple of bodies.

As you probably guess, infidelity with a demon starts to lose its appeal to Alex. On top of explaining himself to Sarah as to where he goes late at night, he also has to contend with his conscience while burying bodies. Plied by sexual favors at first, he eventually breaks up with Mary Lou after the football captain is murdered and police start to question and ultimately arrest him. By then, a fuming Mary Lou begins to believe that Sarah, a smart and pretty blond who doesn’t get mad, but bakes, is the only thing to stand between herself and Alex. Even though Sarah ends up going with school nerd, Leonard, despite his need to stick to a prom night schedule down to the photographs, Sarah is still a threat to Mary Lou.

Personally, I think that Mary Lou should have left Leonard alone instead of killing him by wrapping him in film strip tape and let Sarah see where the date led. Sure, he was a nerdy far cry to the near slob Ratchford would later play in “Cold Case” but if movies teach us anything, it’s the nerds who end up wealthy how many years down the road. He certainly had more of a career than the rest of the cast!

But Sarah is still a threat and attacked. Hamilton High’s Prom, which is held in the newly restored gym, is blitzed by Alex who escaped from jail thanks to an idiot guard and Mary Lou who expects Alex to be the Prom King to Her Queen, complete with a drill attachment to his crown lest Sarah be killed. Alex agrees to ‘go home’ with Mary Lou, back to Hamilton Hell to save Sarah, crown not included.

High school is hellish enough for most people to begin with. In this case, Alex needed to be saved from a hell that contained dead faculty and students out to get him, dirty halls and a Demon Mary Lou that for all her powers is not immune to a flame thrower and the greatest action tag line of all: “I don’t get mad, I bake” from plucky Sarah.

I told you that there were priceless lines in this movie!

Overall, it was enjoyable to watch, but more funny than scary. As I mentioned before, there were great lines. In addition to the baking quip, there are a number of very dark humored PA announcements throughout the school time scenes such as the one where the principal tells the students to wish the cafeteria cook the best of luck as she goes back to her old job at the nuclear plant. While the stars of the cast were okay, I think it was Jeremy Ratchford as Leonard who turned out the best performance. I did expect a little more from Courtney Taylor as Mary Lou, as not only was this the lead role, but one any actress could have a lot of fun with, especially the script being the live action cartoon as it was. She looked good in her many costumes, but that was it really.

While I won’t spoil the ending, I will give credit for a twist outside what was an otherwise formulaic story. What I will say, and what many of you are probably thinking is, maybe next year, Hamilton High will host the Prom at a hotel or venue outside the high school. Between “Carrie” and the “Prom Night” series, you get the sense that holding Prom at the high school is just too dangerous! Then again, if the “Prom Night” of 2008 says anything, school grounds or hotel, there is no safe place to have the Prom. Makes me glad I skipped my own!

Sequels made a joke of many a horror movie. The Prom Night Series is no exception. To top it off, this movie doesn’t follow where the first Prom Night left off. Maybe this is a good thing, since the original Prom Night didn’t leave much room for a sequel.

This sequel runs as a basic revenge slash fest. The movie begins at Hamilton High’s 1957 prom. The focus of the story is bad girl prom queen, Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage). On prom night, Mary Lou jilts her date, Bill Nordham, for the local bad boy, Buddy Cooper. One would think Bill would go home with a broken heart, and spread a few nasty rumors about Mary Lou’s being easy the next day. Since this is a slasher movie, Bill accidentally sets Mary Lou on fire.

After the accident, the movie jumps forward thirty years. Buddy Cooper becomes a priest. I guess his drinking and wenching were not mentioned during the seminary school days. Bill Nordham (Michael Ironside) is the new principal of Hamilton High. Mary Lou Maloney seems forgotten, and a new Prom Queen, Vicki (Wendy Lyon) is to be elected.

This is where we start to have a problem. Vicki, the daughter of puritanical parents, is unable to buy a prom dress. Since she is popular, and expected to look her best as Prom Queen, she decides to hunt around the costume shop of Hamilton High. Surprise, Surprise, she finds the perfect outfit, namely Mary Lou’s old prom gown. Though Mary Lou’s body is dead, her spirit is alive and well and wants her moment as Prom Queen.

In addition to a high body count, the movie had a good gimmick of a wronged prom queen coming back from the dead to claim her old title and maybe exact revenge on the guy that killed her on her big night. This sounds like a straightforward story, yet why did the vengeful spirit wait thirty years to enact revenge? Why would Hamilton High save Mary Lou’s old prom dress when it seems the town wants to forget about the tragedy surrounding the 1957 Prom? Speaking of cover-ups, for the number of deaths that occurred on prom night, people were pretty nonchalant. I can see Vicki possessed by Mary Lou’s old dress, but how could she end up sucked through a chalkboard? Someone would have noticed this in a classroom, right? I keep forgetting that the slasher movie world is far different than the real world.

A teenager’s senior prom is often an important event in their young lives. The event entails a great deal of preparation, and much of the parents’ hard earned cash. It can also be a time of great anxiety for the outcasts of the high school pecking order, those that perhaps cannot find the right dress or tux, or those who haven’t any chance of finding a date. Prom night can mark the ultimate humiliation for any outcast that dares to tread into this haven of the more socially acceptable. It can also mark any number of tragic events, events that can make a fine horror movie if you think about it.

This is not necessarily the case in this movie.

This movie does, on the other hand, reinforce one of many horror movie conventions. Young actresses may start out in slasher movies before making it big. This is also pointed out by Stomp Tokyo. One can look to Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween and Halloween II, Sissy Spacek in Carrie and Patricia Arquette in A Nightmare on Elm St 3: Dream Warriors.

Our story takes place in a small town where a group of children play hide and seek in an abandoned building. They taunt the youngest of them, a girl named Robin, and she takes an accidental fall to her death. Six years later, an unknown stalker calls all involved in Robin’s death and one by one kills them at their senior prom.

I can understand this premise as an event such as the prom will bring this group together. There is also opportunity to humiliate or scare them in public. Our killer, who could be any number of people, including the child molester wrongfully accused of Robin’s death, kills our cannon fodder one by one in secluded areas. The only scare in this kill fest is the head of one of the victim’s rolling on the stage where the King and Queen of the Prom would have been crowned. After the auditorium clears out, the killer is almost ready to be revealed.

As to the identity of the killer, the movie is set up so that it could be any number of people. The director seemed to have been attempting a surprise ending, but the killer’s identity is too obvious and there is no elaborate chase scene, death or real resolution of the movie, so I was more confused than anything.

I was further confused over Jamie Lee Curtis’s role in this film except to play Prom Queen, Kim. She was Robin’s older sister, but she was never involved in her accidental death or her friends’ subsequent cover up. Why wait for the senior prom in the first place to exact revenge for her death as the event, or any dance, is separate from Robin’s death? And why was there a Saturday Night Fever-esque dance sequence and bad disco music. Did Kim and her date have to take center stage to show up her old friend turned rival and her punk boyfriend? I don’t know, but I got a good laugh out of it, nevertheless.

I enjoyed this movie. It was fun, and while not Jamie Curtis’s best performance, she was pretty good. The viewer could have done without the disco sequence, and the sequels after 2.

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.

Once again, I’ll reiterate that to make a good horror movie, it helps to have a good concept. I say it helps. This does not guarantee a good movie. On top of your award winning concept, one requires good writing, acting and camera angles among other things. Valentine is an example of a horror movie with a good gimmick, but little follow through in plot development, characters, and overall story.

Final Destination had a great concept, but it also had the advantage of a tight and well rounded story. It begins with a high school seniors’ class trip to France. One of the students, Alex (Devon Sawa: Now and Then), has a premonition of the plane blowing up and killing his classmates. He is so frightened by what he saw that he tries to warn as many of his classmates off the plane as possible. Since this premonition came out of nowhere, many of the students laugh him off. A handful of students believe him, and a teacher takes Alex and another student he was fighting with off the plane right before takeoff. Of course, not long after the plane leaves the runway, it explodes.

This event makes headlines, naturally, and the class commencement ceremony is a sad one. FBI agents, however, are a little suspicious that Alex predicted the explosion and knew enough to get off the plane and warn as many people as possible. They decide to follow and watch him. This is interesting because as it turns out, the survivors of the plane crash start to die one by one in very unusual ways.
The reason the survivors start to die off is simple. It is not a masked maniac, Satan, radioactive zombies, killer tomatoes, cannibal families or mutant bunnies. The gimmick of this film is that the killer is Death itself and its design. Turns out, Alex and the classmates he managed to get off the plane were predestined to die in that plane explosion. They only managed to avoid Death, so in retaliation, Death sets out to claim the lives promised to him in the most painful and absurd manner possible.

One by one, our cannon fodder meets Death up close and personal. It seems that Death is Rube Goldberg because some of the death scenes get pretty elaborate. One girl is hit by a bus, which is nondescript enough, but the way one other boy trips and falls in the shower, somehow managing not only to strangle himself in the tub, but make it look like he hung himself was just outright silly, as was the scene where the teacher accidentally set her own house on fire while accidentally stabbing herself in the stomach as a piece of metal lodges itself into her neck.
I know very little about death, but I was under the impression that the Grim Reaper can kill you with a mere touch. The reasons for the cartoonish nature of the deaths couldn’t be explained by anyone, even the mortician that seemed to know about Death’s inner workings in the film far beyond his profession, played to creepy and enjoyable extremes by Tony Todd of Candyman fame. Maybe the writers wanted to make this film as garish as possible to make it more interesting, or maybe Death wanted his fifteen minutes of fame. The world may never know, but the concept alone gives film makers enough material to spawn more than a few sequels.