Final Destination 3

USAToday, "It's nighttime, we're on the carnival midway, and singing carousel barker Gordon MacRae ... no wait, wrong movie. It's nighttime, we're on the carnival midway, and the heroine of Final Destination 3 has a premonition of impending disaster, in keeping with the story hook of this chiller's un-final screen predecessors. What's more, we can see that this pending high school grad (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is straight, unflighty and to be trusted. Why? Because she's on the yearbook staff, and her name is Wendy.

Anti-cipating a roller-coaster tragedy that indeed ensues, Wendy and a handful of survivors bolt off the carny ride just before mass doom. But wait: Moments before that, we've seen her with a cellphone camera snapping classmate "color" for the yearbook.

Included are two senior-class slatterns who say "totally" a lot. As in, say, "Your thong is so totally Wal-Mart" or "I'm so totally not into Silas Marner."

Turns out these photos offer subtle hints and more premonitions of supernaturally ritualistic deaths to come, all targeting survivors, bang-bang-bang. At its heart, this second sequel is standard slasher stuff, though director James Wong does rise (or maybe sink) to the occasion with grisly staging. Of course, when a classmate has been portrayed as gauche or stupid, you know his or her days are numbered.

So when the "Totally" Twins lie down in one of those tanning salon troughs and take off their tops, look out. Movies of this genre don't often engage fresh concepts, but you have to give Wong major points for dreaming up "tan-line flambé."