Rollercoaster, fireworks, sunbeds, subways … gyms? Wait … sunbeds? Oh, don’t tell me you never realised they were all deathtraps?! The whole planet is a deathtrap, didn’t you know? Life! ... itself! ... is a deathtrap! The knowingness is in overdrive in this 3rd installment of the series and while there’s a sense in which it could be enjoyed on its own, you’ll appreciate it more if you saw and dug the first 2. Myself, I mostly laughed my ass off for the full 80 minutes, but the laughs are even more perfectly punctured by gasps than they were in the first movie (well, let’s face it, I was pretty much too dumbstruck after the planecrash the first time I saw that to laugh at anything).

I’ve whined about gore in horror movies more than ever recently, feels like it anyway. There was some aura I got off the first few minutes of this movie that made me panic for a moment that they might’ve toned it down for a more commercial rating but oh no, some of the deaths here will give you nightmares, even as you’re laughing (my favourite juxtaposition of the gag and the gag reflex here? Has to be the cut from sunbeds to coffins – oh my god, I think my lungs literally emptied with shock and relief giggles). The wonder of it is that James Wong has mastered something I want to call blood timing – the fact that you can probably count the amount of gore in this movie in frames but it feels like so much more such is its effectiveness. Sometimes a little splatter speaks volumes more than buckets and buckets of the stuff – the tiny specks of blood Kate Winslet coughs onto her handkerchief in Heavenly Creatures have always made me shudder more than Kubrick’s elevator in The Shining.

But in the end … What a bummer! There is no ending! I needed something else at the end here, another 10 minutes, I don’t know what. It’s the one thing they’ve never really mastered in this series – how does the problem of stalking death resolve itself? And I realise that the answer is clearly that it doesn’t … like I said in the first paragraph, the point is something I’ve been telling those labels on cigarette packs for years: LIFE KILLS lol – but, y’know, there’s resolution, and there’s resolution, and professional screenwriters should be able to come up with something better than another daymare. They don’t quite have our heroine wake up and realise, “and it was all a dream,” but they might as well have. Looking back at the other two movies, I realise that this isn’t that new; they both ended in a similar manner. But there’s definitely something more missing here and it’s the one thing bringing the movie down in my mind.

I think this is easily the best in the series – though the opening sequence of the first remains beyond compare, and I’d recommend you run through the others beforehand … it’s a cumulative thing. Aside from the non-ending, which I’ll probably learn to live with and probably has alternatives on the DVD, it’s a solid 4 stars, striking the perfect balance between horror and comedy, though I’m guessing it probably all depends on your outlook too. Put it this way: if you hate vain blondes and the culture of fear, you’re in for an absolute treat.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 1:49 am in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.