An obvious underlying principle of the horror genre is to take a franchise which makes money, and wring it until every last penny and last spark of originality which made it a success in the first place are extracted (see “Halloween,” “Friday the 13th,” “Saw,” etc.) It appears that “The Final Destination” has undergone the same treatment. This lifeless and boring addition to the series is nothing more than a reheated version of the last three with only the gimmick of 3-D to save it from complete uselessness.

Like in previous installments a group of people are saved from a tragic and bloody disaster by a fortuitous premonition only to be hunted down by some non-corporeal version of Death himself. In the first movie it was a very scary plane crash, in the second a brutal highway pile-up, and the third was a kind of silly but still fun roller-coaster accident. Here it is a car crash again, signal one that we are in for nothing new, though it is at a local stock car raceway instead of the open highway. Then the inevitable slaughter starts as the survivors are picked off in elaborate Rube Goldberg type deaths.