ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - January 31st
"FINAL DESTINATION 2" released in 2003
When a young woman has a violent premonition of a highway pileup, she blocks the freeway which keeps her and a few others meant to die, safe...Or are they? When the survivors mysteriously start dying, it's up to her to try and find a way to stop Death's design before she's next, in David R. Ellis' Final Destination 2!
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One year after the tragic events of Flight 180, college student Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) is heading to Daytona Beach, Florida for spring break with her friends, Shaina McKlank (Sarah Carter), Dano Estevez (Alex Rae), and Frankie Whitman (Shaun Sipos). En route, Kimberly has a premonition of logs falling off a semi, causing a massive car crash that kills everyone involved. She stalls her car on the entrance ramp, preventing several people from entering the highway, including Lottery winner Evan Lewis (David Paetkau); widow Nora Carpenter (Lynda Boyd) and her fifteen-year-old son Tim (James Kirk); businesswoman Kat Jennings (Keegan Connor Tracy); stoner Rory Peters (Jonathan Cherry); pregnant Isabella Hudson (Justina Machado); high school teacher Eugene Dix (T.C. Carson); and Deputy Marshal Thomas Burke (Michael Landes). While Thomas questions Kimberly, the pileup occurs just Kimberly foresaw. Shaina, Dano and Frankie are killed by a speeding truck, but Kimberly is saved by Thomas. The survivors are brought to the police station, where they learn about the curse of Flight 180, and later, a chain reaction causes a fire in Evan's apartment which he barely escapes; but when Evan slips the escape ladder falls and impales his eye. Kimberly starts to wonder if the flight 180 incident and the events after weren't just a coincidence. Her only hope lies in Clear Rivers, the sole survivor of flight 180, has been living life in a mental hospital after the bizarre events that lead to the deaths of her friends. But can she help the survivors cheat death one more time?
Clear Rivers: Look, we drove a long way to get here, so if you happen to know how to stop Death, it would be really great if you told us.
William Bludworth: You can't cheat Death. There are no escapes.
Clear Rivers: Bullshit! You told me Death has a distinct design. But Alex and I cheated Death, not once but dozens of times. The design is flawed, it can be beaten.
William Bludworth: Such fire in you now. People are always most alive just before they die. Don't you think?
[rips off Evan's nipple piercing with a pair of pliers and begins to whistle as he cremates Evan's body]
Top: (R-L) Kimberley (A.J. Cook), Clear (Ali Later), and Thomas (Michael Landes) search for a way to beat Death's design;
Above: Their search leads them inevitably back to mortician William Bludworth (Tony Todd) who offers them a cryptic solution
Following the huge success of Final Destination (2000), New Line Cinema's then-President of Production Toby Emmerich approached writer Jeffrey Reddick - who had originally conceived of Final Destination as a spec script for an X-Files episode - to write the sequel. Unfortunately, the first films respective director and producer (and co-writers) James Wong and Glenn Morgan weren't available for production of the sequel, as they had signed to their own individual directorial projects; The One (for Wong) and and the remake Willard (for Morgan). Instead, New Line hired second unit director and stunt coordinator David R. Ellis as director, with writing partners Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber coming onboard to write the later drafts of the screenplay. Warren Zide and Craig Perry also returned and helped on financing/producing the film.
Originally, Devon Sawa was to reprise his role of Alex Browning for the first film, but a dispute concerning his contract with New Line Cinema could not be settled (so in the movie, it is implied by a newspaper clipping that his character Alex was killed off by a falling brick to the head, as the reason for his character not returning). Despite Sawa's absence, Ali Larter returned to reprise her role as Clear Rivers, with Tony Todd also coming back as the devillish mortician William Bludworth. Canadian actress A.J. Cook was cast as heroine Kimberley Corman after impressing Ellis and Perry by her sensitivity and vulnerability in her audition, and was hired instantly. Ellis described her role as "a girl who can have some fun cause they're going on a trip and they're gonna have a good time, yet someone who can stand up to Clear, to come and challenge Clear on a race, and to bother with Clear."
Newcomers to the cast included many television actors; former Living Single star T. C. Carson (as Eugene Dix), Blackwoods actress Keegan Connor Tracy (playing Kat Jennings), Justina Machado from Six Feet Under (as the pregnant Isabelle), and Michael Landes - who appeared in the TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman - as the heroic Deputy Thomas Burke. Rounding out the cast of the "survivors" were Lynda Boyd, James Kirk, and David Paetkau, as Niora and Tim Carpenter and gambler/lottery winner Evan Lewis respectively. Debut actors Sarah Carter, Alejandro Rae, and Shaun Sipos were hired as Kimberly's friends Shaina McKlank, Dano Estevez, and Frankie Whitman correspondingly.
Originally, Devon Sawa was to reprise his role of Alex Browning for the first film, but a dispute concerning his contract with New Line Cinema could not be settled (so in the movie, it is implied by a newspaper clipping that his character Alex was killed off by a falling brick to the head, as the reason for his character not returning). Despite Sawa's absence, Ali Larter returned to reprise her role as Clear Rivers, with Tony Todd also coming back as the devillish mortician William Bludworth. Canadian actress A.J. Cook was cast as heroine Kimberley Corman after impressing Ellis and Perry by her sensitivity and vulnerability in her audition, and was hired instantly. Ellis described her role as "a girl who can have some fun cause they're going on a trip and they're gonna have a good time, yet someone who can stand up to Clear, to come and challenge Clear on a race, and to bother with Clear."
Newcomers to the cast included many television actors; former Living Single star T. C. Carson (as Eugene Dix), Blackwoods actress Keegan Connor Tracy (playing Kat Jennings), Justina Machado from Six Feet Under (as the pregnant Isabelle), and Michael Landes - who appeared in the TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman - as the heroic Deputy Thomas Burke. Rounding out the cast of the "survivors" were Lynda Boyd, James Kirk, and David Paetkau, as Niora and Tim Carpenter and gambler/lottery winner Evan Lewis respectively. Debut actors Sarah Carter, Alejandro Rae, and Shaun Sipos were hired as Kimberly's friends Shaina McKlank, Dano Estevez, and Frankie Whitman correspondingly.
Above: Tim meets an unexpected and gruesome end!
Like the first Final Destination, the sequel waas filmed on location in and around Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The Plaza of Nations was used as a stand-in for Ellis Medical Complex - and the site of Tim's death - while the farm and lake scenes were filmed in Campbell River and Okanagan Lake respectively, though it is depicted in Greenwood Lake, New York. "We shot part of it at the lake where it was 37° cold, which is beyond an ice cream headache. And the second stuff we shot in a big huge tank where we filmed all the underwater sequence, that was in a 93° pool," Landes later clarified (interestingly, Cook and Landes performed their own stunts in both sequences). For the film's opening sequence, British Columbia Highway 19 was utilized as Route 23.
Montage of Death; In the first image, a wide-angle view of Campbell River is shot for background use in the final result. In the second image, a lifecast of Cherry is positioned against a green screen and severed in pieces. In the third image, the first and second image are composited to be presented among the continuity of the film.
Digital Domains Visual Effects Supervisor Jason Crosby pointed out that their studio was mainly selected for the highway sequence after the crew realized real logs only bounced about an inch off the road when dropped from a logging truck. "They were concerned about how they would make the shot happen, not knowing if CG would work. The timing was great because we had just finished a test shot of our CG logs bouncing on the freeway. We sent a tape to Vancouver and after seeing it the crew was convinced that any of the log shots could be done with CG," Crosby indicated. In spite of this, there are no CG cars incorporated in the actual film.
TRIVIA: Beginning his career as a stuntman, David R. Ellis was probably most remembered for his stunt work in Brian De Palms's Scarface (1983).
Top: Director David R. Ellis;
Above: Ellis on set with Ali Larter and A.J. Cook
Final Destination 2 premiered in 2,834 theaters across the United States and Canada on January 31, 2003, earning $16,017,141 in its opening weekend (placing #2 in the United States box office behind the spy thriller, The Recruit). Ultimately, the movie earned nearly $47 million the US/Canada and another $43 million worldwide, for a total gross over $90 million ($22 million less than it's predecessor).
Analogous to its forerunner, the film received generally mixed reviews from critics, with most negative evaluations condemning the film's plot, acting, and screenplay. Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times groused that "perhaps movies are like history, and repeat themselves, first as tragedy, then as farce." Claudia Puig of USA Today wrote on how that "there is an audience for a movie in which innocent people suffer hideous accidental deaths is troubling enough, but a group of creative people chose to direct their energies on this repulsive spectacle [which] simply provokes disgust." However, A. O. Scott of The New York Times imparted "it's not as cheekily knowing as the Scream movies or as trashily Grand Guignol as the Evil Dead franchise, but like those pictures it recognizes the close relationship between fright and laughter, and dispenses both with a free, unpretentious hand", whereas Sheila Norman-Culp of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution proclaimed that "what Final Destination did for the fear of flying, Final Destination 2 does for the fear of driving."
Three years later, James Wong and Glenn Morgan would return to the series to write/produce/direct Final Destination 3, this time starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, and Amanda Crew. Final Destination 3 was another financially successful film in the franchise with a worldwide gross of nearly $120 million. Although Destination 3 was intended to be filmed in 3-D, it wasn't until Final Destination 4 (with David R. Ellis returning to direct) that technology had advanced to the stage that shooting in 3-D was viable (with most of the equipment and technical crew fresh of James Cameron's 3-D epic Avatar). Even though FD4 was billed as the "final" film the series (hence it's alternate title of The Final Destination), New Line Cinema again brought the series back with 2011's Final Destination 5, this time directed by Avatar's 2nd Unit Director, Steven Quale. While FD5 is the second highest grossing film in the franchise, it was however the most critically acclaimed movie in the series, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 61%.
Analogous to its forerunner, the film received generally mixed reviews from critics, with most negative evaluations condemning the film's plot, acting, and screenplay. Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times groused that "perhaps movies are like history, and repeat themselves, first as tragedy, then as farce." Claudia Puig of USA Today wrote on how that "there is an audience for a movie in which innocent people suffer hideous accidental deaths is troubling enough, but a group of creative people chose to direct their energies on this repulsive spectacle [which] simply provokes disgust." However, A. O. Scott of The New York Times imparted "it's not as cheekily knowing as the Scream movies or as trashily Grand Guignol as the Evil Dead franchise, but like those pictures it recognizes the close relationship between fright and laughter, and dispenses both with a free, unpretentious hand", whereas Sheila Norman-Culp of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution proclaimed that "what Final Destination did for the fear of flying, Final Destination 2 does for the fear of driving."
Three years later, James Wong and Glenn Morgan would return to the series to write/produce/direct Final Destination 3, this time starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, and Amanda Crew. Final Destination 3 was another financially successful film in the franchise with a worldwide gross of nearly $120 million. Although Destination 3 was intended to be filmed in 3-D, it wasn't until Final Destination 4 (with David R. Ellis returning to direct) that technology had advanced to the stage that shooting in 3-D was viable (with most of the equipment and technical crew fresh of James Cameron's 3-D epic Avatar). Even though FD4 was billed as the "final" film the series (hence it's alternate title of The Final Destination), New Line Cinema again brought the series back with 2011's Final Destination 5, this time directed by Avatar's 2nd Unit Director, Steven Quale. While FD5 is the second highest grossing film in the franchise, it was however the most critically acclaimed movie in the series, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 61%.
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 38%
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