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From New Line Cinema, "The House That Freddy Built," comes the latest in the youthmarket iteration of the current horror boom, which thus far has ranged from the ridiculous (Urban Legend) to the ridiculous (the idea of giving junk like Urban Legend a sequel). The difference is, this one is written and directed by Glen Morgan and James Wong, known for working on "The X-Files" rather than Gap commercials, so at it least has potential.
The story is Duchovnian enough: six good-looking high schools students and a good-looking teacher, part of a senior class trip to Paris, deplane when Alex (Idle Hands star Devon Sawa) follows several numerological coincidences with a vision of the flight crashing in flames. He turns out to be right, and they're the only survivors, which makes the rest of the community suspicious enough until, a month later, they begin dying gruesome, complex, accidental deaths wherein nature and household appliances conspire in unlikely pyrotechnic mayhem. And they hear "Rocky Mountain High" play over and over again, which is even worse. Alex must find the pattern and defeat Death before it -- and "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" -- comes to reclaim the rest of them.
Which sounds a lot a couple episodes Morgan and Wong did for Chris Carter, although here they employ a much narrower vocabulary (think, "The F-Files"). Final Departure offers a couple genuinely scary, stylish surprises (especially the ending), but it also takes a few visual devices that were cliché to begin with -- ticking clocks, windblown curtains, fluttering pages -- and seeks to wring every last drop of suspense from them. Most egregiously distracting is the Rube Goldberg sequence of events in each death. They're grisly Tom & Jerry cartoons: the steam from the teapot melts the cord on the iron, which falls off the ironing board, which flies into the closet door, which knocks a broom into a switch that sets off a nuclear reactor Grandpa built in the basement 50 years ago out of popsicle sticks and Drano, while the victim displays the height of stupidity by strolling around oblivious in the machine like a human roulette marble. Too silly. Fortunately there's also some intentional humor, most notably in a scene where Alex tries to beat the odds by safety-wiring every potential accident in the house. That, and most of the characters have silly names, largely but not exclusively taken from classic horror actors and directors.
If you're a diehard fan of "Files" (most of the players have appeared in episodes of one Chris Carter show or another), enjoy horror trivia, or simply don't mind idiot-driven plots, it's kind of fun in a slipped-on-the-soap sort of way. C+
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