A SCENE from ‘The Final Destination.’

The fourth in the series of movies about people cheating death then starting to die one after the other, “The Final Destination” follows the same formula of its predecessors. The wonder of it is that viewers continue to flock to it even if they already know what would happen: everybody dies. This proves that the sight of someone being killed on screen offers a truly morbid fascination to most mortals who know they’ll also suffer the same fate of having an appointment with the grim reaper, sooner or later.

This time, the opening scene where a bloodbath occurs is set in a race track. (The first featured a plane crash; the second, a freeway car crash; the third one, a roller coaster disaster.) Four young people are at the center of the story: Nick (Bobby Campo), Lori (Shantel Van Santen), Hunt (Nick Zano) and Janet (Haley Webb). It’s Nick who has a vision of the coming carnage just before it happens. He is able to convince his friends and some other people that something bad is about to happen, so they are able to get out of the stadium just in time before the catastrophe occurs.

Soon, the doomed survivors are killed one by one. Campo thinks they can try to cheat death’s design by saving one of the victims but death has other plans for them. The movie would have been more effective if the victims are people that viewers can identify with. But when you have one-dimensional characters who are either self-centered or just plain so “tanga” (dumb), what happens is that you actually cheer when they finally get killed, like a racist guy who wants to set a cross on fire on the lawn of the film’s token black guy (ala-Ku Klux Klan). It’s his vehicle that gets burned and he is dragged down the street along with it. Serves him right.

Ditto for the hunky Hunt (he’s shown having sex with a topless babe) who is sucked down the drain at the bottom of a swimming pool and drowns. Another victim gets crushed when the whole floor of a room above him crashes down due to a bath tub that overflowed. Someone nearly gets killed by a carwash and another one is actually killed by an escalator. In the race track, someone is skewered right on the mouth and a woman’s head is decapitated by a flying object.

You’d think they’d come out with a more inventive storyline this time, but as they say, if it aint’ broke, why fix it? So there’s really no change at all in the plotting. But Nick does have two visions. He also sees the destruction of a mall. Maybe next time, they can explore what the source of the premonitions is. Oh yes, there is also a change in the presentation as this is available on 3-D. If you’d watch this on 3-D, you’d see cars, various objects and even spurts of blood being hurled at you. If you get a kick from that gory kind of thing, then you’ll enjoy this mindless and badly acted movie.

Director David Ellis (who also did the second movie and “Snakes on a Plane”) also plays on our expectations, like the sequence at the beauty salon where you think a young mom will be demolished while having her hair done, but it turns out there is another simpler but also fatal plan to get rid of her.

This fourth film is titled “The Final Destination” but now that it’s making oodles of money, we doubt very much if New Line Cinema would really stop in making more sequels. As of this writing, this fourth installment has already raked in about $60 million. You cannot cheat death, but the producers have turned him into a cash register that keeps on ringing merrily while on they’re way to their favorite destination: The bank.