Final Destination 3

Six years ago in Final Destination, a premonition saves five American high-school kids from dying in an aircraft crash. But you can't beat the man with the scythe and one by one they die in spectacular accidents. Three years ago, Final Destination 2 repeated the plot, only this time it's a road pile-up that is foreseen before they meet their quietuses severally. For Final Destination 3, the piece of crumpled carbon paper from which the scripts derive has been passed back to the director and co-writer of the first film, James Wong.

The doomed teenagers this time are seniors on a pre-graduation excursion to a funfair, who survive a terrifying accident on the scariest rollercoaster you ever saw. Fittingly called Devil's Flight, it's presided over by a giant statue of Satan, whose followers apparently have no objection to his image being displayed for public mockery. The girl who has the premonition has taken pictures of the survivors before the crash and these images contain clues as to how the individual deaths will occur.

The makers of this calculatedly nasty picture get a double laugh from each elaborately prepared execution. The first laugh comes when the victim is decapitated, crushed, turned into a pin cushion for missiles from a nail-gun; the second from the subsequent funeral, or double funeral in the case of two girls roasted side by side in tanning machines. 'Did I do something to bring this on?' says the prescient heroine. The movie ends with a cliffhanger for Final Destination 4, and I suggest they get a little imaginative and call it 'Deja vu to a Kill'.