FINAL DESTINATION 3

“Final Destination 3″ is in the relentless tradition of the original Dead Teenager Movies, which existed to kill all the teenagers in the movie except one, who was left alive to star in the sequel, explaining to fresh victims what happened beack then.

The movie starts with Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and her friends at a carnival. She refuses to get on the roller coaster because she’s convinced it will crash. It does, with many detailed scenes in which teenagers cling desperately to upside-down coaster cars, are beheaded, etc, its cool in a not-so-morbid-kind-of-way.

Wendy and her friend Kevin (Ryan Merriman) learn that the kids who didn’t get on the doomed airplane in “FD1″ died anyway, in the same order they were intended to board the plane. Is the same fate in store for the kids who didn’t get on the roller coaster? Wendy, who was taking digital photos at the carnival, loads them into her computer and uses them to figure out what the likely order of victims will be.

Do they all die? The point in these movies is not if they die, but how they die, and Fate must stay up nights devising ingenious executions. There is a crushing experience in the takeout lane at Fatburger, a crispy afternoon at a tanning salon, a beheading, a gruesome death by nail gun, an unfortunate fireworks accident, and at the end everyone gets on a train when they should be checking into an emergency room just as a precaution.

“Final Destination 3″ is good-looking and made with technical skill. I bet it was a challenge for the filmmakers because how exactly how do you go about killing a handful of kids in 90 minutes — in ways your audience has yet to see? The director did an especially good job of evoking a creepy sense of menace on a carnival midway. Has there ever been a carnival midway in a movie that didn’t look like a sadomasochistic nightmare? The rides look fatal, the sideshows look like portals to hell, and you know that game where you slam down a big hammer to make the weight fly up and hit the bell? One kid pounds so hard, the weight crashes through the bell and flies off into the air. I expected it to land on somebody’s head, or maybe on the roller-coaster tracks, and maybe it did and I missed it, because there was a lot going on. But as nearly as I can figure, the weight is still up there somewhere.