Directed by Steven Quale. Starring Nicholas D’Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher, Tony Todd.

After the first two films you stopped expecting anything from the Final Destination franchise except formulaic deaths. But they sorta reinvented themselves in the last film and with Final Destination 5 they’ve mastered the craft of gore, illusion and deception. This film is so crazy; it’s funny, chilling and smart.

If you’ve seen any of the last four films you’ll know the premise: a group of youngsters setting out on a journey, a boy or girl has a premonition of a hideous disaster about to befall their group as one by one they all die. The portent listened to, some survive, but can you really cheat death? That depends.

In FD 5, cute boy Sam (D’Agosto) has a ‘vision’ during an employee trip; the bridge their bus is on is going to collapse. And so it does. With masterful CGI, and so much glee, the filmmakers show the employees being picked off one at a time. In Sam’s vision that is. Whoever is coming up with this has one twisted but glorious mind. You squirm at the gory corpses but then you burst out laughing at the way they have been decapitated or sliced in half.

The survivors of the disaster are shaken and soon to be stirred in the cauldron of death’s sticky clutches. In the order they died in Sam’s vision, they die doing the most mundane of things, like getting a massage (hilarious scene). How do they evade death? Tony Todd’s coroner character Mr Bludworth returns to warn them: Only if someone else dies in their place will they survive; balancing the books!

The audience grimaced, screamed, laughed (so did I), and guessed how the next person would die. Would he be impaled on something, would the fire get him, electrocuted maybe? Director Steven Quale keeps you guessing and uses some deft tricks to make you think the character will die this way, but that’s where the brilliance of the film lies, in its suspense.

Nicholas D’Agosto as the cute boy with the premonition is good, the rest are alright. Miles Fisher who plays the employee determined at all costs not to die, looks strikingly like Tom Cruise (well a cheaper version).