With Final Destination: Bloodlines available to rent streaming, I was thinking of watching it but first I thought I'd brush up on the series. I thought about it a minute and figured I'd only seen maybe the first two or three. I clearly remembered seeing the first one at least twice, and I remembered the highway pileup and the roller coaster opening disasters of two others though I wasn't sure which order they fell in the series. Turns out they were the second and third respectively.
But once the all-evening bingefest was underway (not too horribly taxing since the films are only an hour and a half or so each...but still, my eyes are blurry to say the least!) I soon stumbled across my old friend Mr. Shameless Syndrome and realized, as each scene for each movie came up, that in fact I'd seen ALL FIVE of the movies prior to the brand-new one just released this year!
But, I guess happily, if you can look at a form of dementia with a positive attitude, it made for a quite nice surprise twist at the end of the night. Since I had watched the series from start to finish chronologically, when I got to the 5th film, I naturally thought it was a sequel to the original like the previous three. (Even the oddly-named fourth movie called just "The Final Destination" wasn't given that name without a number because it was a reboot, it was just "supposed" to be the "final" film in the franchise, but since it did well at the box-office, they made another one.) But the fifth movie turned out to have, for me, a twist ending since it was revealed that at the end, our last survivors die either in the fiery plane explosion from the first film, or for one guy, as a result of the plane's debris crashing down on him. And remember...I WATCHED THIS ALL BEFORE!
Ah good old Shameless Syndrome. In a few years, I can drop all my expensive streaming services -- heck, I'll even drop the internet all together -- and get a cheap second-hand DVD player from Goodwill, pop in a DVD I have hanging around here like The Core or Sideways (I have no idea why I bought these two shitty movies let alone why I still have them) and just play them over and over and over again. Be forewarned if you start seeing a post sometime in the future that says "Great new movie I just saw with Thomas Hayden Church and Paul Giamatti!" Oh, I won't have internet so you won't see it. Oh, I'll probably try to post it somehow and wonder why it won't "publish." Oh, and if I ever get so bad that I actually LIKE Sideways enough to post about it, please find me and help me meet my own fucking final destination!