Director: David R. Ellis
Year: 2009
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural Slasher
Plot:
When a premonition from a friend saves a group of spectators from a horrific car crash at a car race, their mysterious deaths afterward have him convinced that a diabolical entity has set about ensuring they're supposed to die, and he tries to save them before they're all killed.
Review:
While this one was still quite fun, there's an obvious decline over the others in the series. As is usually the case with the franchise, this one manages to get started really nicely as its opening crash is pretty cool, running through the extremely convoluted setup required to initiate the chain of events in the first place, but also managing to get plenty of fun with the opportunity for some really bloody and graphic kills due to the premonition nature of the sequence. As well, the fiery spectacle of it all and all the fun of what happens in the real world all help to make for a solid opening here that isn't as impactful as the others, but still serves as fun overall.
Beyond this, the film gets some really enjoyable elements from it's rather convoluted and contrived set-ups that manage to bring about some ingenious attempts at suspense throughout the scenes, from the admittedly silly attack at the guy's house where the rolling truck lights him on fire, the outcome at the salon parlor and the events at the mechanics create a rather fine and chilling set-up here that makes for quite a nice time overall here where this one some suspense to be had from how they're all placed in here. As well, the other great scenes here offer up a ton of thrilling moments from it's bigger set-pieces where this one really scores, starting with the race to free the trapped friend at the car-wash or the different scenarios that play out at the hospital and leading into the mall scenarios where it decides to pack in the action and suspense of what's occurring in both the vision and what happens in real life. The brevity is to be commended as it doesn't overstay its welcome, and there's plenty of fun to be had here with this one.
There are a few problems to be had with this one, which starts with the utterly lame and ridiculous sloppiness merely there to set up the death that wouldn't happen that way in real life, a rather problematic factor in the series as a whole. Many of these set-ups are so needlessly contrived and purposefully exaggerated that there's nothing taken from what's supposed to be taken seriously from these scenes, and the amount of work required to make them logical occurrences borders on the insane. Aside from several personal indiscretions, the film, another big problem with its actual method of conception, like the blatant and retarded 3D gags, filled with some of the most woeful and utterly atrocious CGI hurled at the screen, which ruins so many of these scenes looking as bad as they do, which makes this the biggest problem overall here. This one wasn't that bad and was way better than expected, though it's still somewhat flawed.
Overview: ***/5
Fun if slightly flawed franchise entry, this one is decent enough for what it is, although the majority of the flaws here overwhelm this one to the point of being the clear bottom of the franchise. Give it a shot if you're fine with the positives on display or if you're a die-hard fanatic of the franchise to this point, while most others out there should heed extreme caution with it.
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