Gory Guilty Pleasures

I have no Classics class today, because our professor has run off to some conference or another, in Portugal. So here I am, reading authors' blogs, working on my English Essay, and surfing the web.
There's apparently a trailer out now, at Apple.com for Final Destination 3. Oooh!
It will probably not go down into the annals of film history, but it's a guilty pleasure that I, and my sisters #1 and #2 partake of, on occasion.
We saw the first Final Destination movie, which involved a teen who gets an explicit and graphic vision of his plane exploding in mid-air, and waking up in a panic, gets himself and five other people kicked off the flight. Guess what? The plane explodes ten minutes after taking off, and the plot is that Death had a particular plan, and that by ruining the plan for himself and five other people, the teen and his friends are being stalked by Death, who means to set things right. You never see him, but through intricate, gears-and-bolts and seeming coincidences, the teens die, horribly. Sad to say, it's fun to watch.
What's interesting about the Final Destination films is that you can't yell at the characters for being stupid. They don't die by going down into the basement by themselves, or by wandering off into an abandoned warehouses. They meet their ridiculously violent deaths by seeming accident. In the first film, one boy slips on a conveniently placed puddle (Death's work) and ends up hanging himself on a clothsline in his bathtub. Another girl walks out into the street and gets hit by a bus. Another boy (played by Sean William Scott) get beheaded (or more accurately, half-beheaded, he leaves his chin behind) by a piece of metal that was sent flying by a speeding train. A teacher gets the most violent death - she ends up jabbed in the throat (by an exploding computer) stabbed (by falling knives), and burned (poorly-maintained oven). You've have to see it to believe it. And at the very end, a year later, one of the three remaining people ends up crushed by a piece of French architecture in Paris. The boy with the vision dies off-screen, by a falling brick (how pedestrian!), or so we're told by the final survivor in the second movie.
The second Final Destination involves a young woman who has a vision of a horrible highway accident involving a logging truck. In a panic, she stops her car in the middle of a merge and prevents the people behind her from driving on and meeting their predestined fates. In this one, we meet the last survivor of the last movie, who's holed herself up in a loony bin to keep Death from coming after her. This movie has a bunch of twisty things about it, as well as gory deaths. We learn in the film that all the people who were supposed to die in the accident, had had their lives saved before by the deaths of the people in the first film (example: a substitute teacher was moved from one school to another, and ended up avoiding a school shooting - and guess who he was called to replace? That's right - the jabbed/stabbed/burned teacher from the 1st movie).
This movie was a little sillier because it showed that that Death doesn't just screw up once in a while, but apparently all the freakin' time. He even makes several false-starts and miscalculations in this film! A teen (before he's finally crushed beneath a falling pane of glass), is supposed to die in the dentist's chair, when he's breathing sleepy-gas through his nose and a broken piece of a mobile falls into this throat, in one of the most gruesome dentist-movie-scenes ever. He's saved by a dentist! Damn you, Death! Get it together!
In this film, the last survivor from the 1st film and one of the other characters dies when an oxygen tank in a hospital is set alight, a lottery winner is impaled through the eye by a falling fire-escape ladder, a crack addict is cut into three pieces by a flying barbed-wire fence, a woman is beheaded by an elevator, a boy is flame-broiled by an exploding barbeque, and woman is skewered through the head when a airbag is deployed, which pushes her head back onto the spike protruding from her headrest, the result of a car accident.
It's deliciously evil to watch, but how they set up the deaths is fairly entertaining and suspenceful. The third movie, judging from the trailer, seems to base itself on a roller coaster disaster that yet another pyschic teen escapes, along with a group of doomed youngsters. The deaths in this one (again, judging from the trailer) seem to include a malfunctioning tanning bed, falling swords, wooden stakes, a rear-end collision, and fireworks.
I don't think I'll be lining up to see it in theatres, but I might want to take a look at it when it comes out on DVD.