Every Final Destination Movie Ranked

Final Destination 3 gets off to a shaky start. Its opening disaster - a rollercoaster crash - has aged horribly and is too unrealistic to take seriously. That is not how rollercoasters work. At all. 

Other than that, though? Final Destination 3 is among the most purely entertaining horror sequels ever made. It features what might just be the best collection of death scenes in the entire franchise, a ferocious, palm-sweating and paranoia inducing series of accidents that, disturbing though they are (especially that harrowing tanning bed sequence), are also delivered with a well-judged safety net of pitch-black humour. 

A rollercoaster would indeed be an apt representation of this endlessly thrilling and intelligently campy horror knockout that also does a surprisingly decent job with its character line-up. Visionary Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who's unnecessarily excellent in the role) and secondary lead Kevin (Ryan Merriman) are an immensely likable pair and the supporting characters, though fairly stereotypical, are a thoroughly entertaining grouping who range from sympathetic to hilariously unlikable. 

This is a movie that leans into the mixture of sadism, camp, suspense and black comedy that audiences fall in love with slasher movies to begin with, and it gets the tone absolutely bang-on. It doesn't necessarily offer much innovation, although it does introduce the series' first human villain (Ian, played by Kris Lemche); basically, this just repeats the formula of the first two films but it does it really, really well, and sometimes that's enough.