The Movie: Final Destination is what I'd describe as a "teen horror movie", targeting the same sort of demographic as Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I found it to be fun and entertaining to watch. The movie explores the premise, "What happens when you're time is up, but you cheat death?", and according to this movie, your time is still up, and Death will come and get you as soon as it can.
I have to admit, the death scenes in this movie were nicely done and had an original flair to them. I especially liked the fact that a whole lot of tension was built up by watching the victim do many normal activities, that in the light of this movie, suddenly seem extremely dangerous... none of which end up being the way they actually die... if that makes any sense.
Anyway, as with most horror movies, leave your brain at the door, sit back and enjoy!
The DVD: This disc is part of New Line's "Platinum Series"... who also has an "Infinifilm" series for special editions... why two? Who knows, but the video transfer was certainly very clean, looking very nice, with very few compression artifacts, except that I noticed a couple of hints of gradient stepping, but overall it was a pretty darn nice transfer. The audio was also pretty good, though nothing particularly special.
Special features include a theatrical trailer, deleted scenes (and an alternate ending), a filmmaker's commentary track, an actor's commentary track, a fairly interesting documentary on the process of screening films before they are released to give them that extra little tweak, a not as interesting documentary on a real-life psychic that has nothing to do with a movie, plus a couple of "games" which consisted of a "death clock" and "are you psychic" test. All of the video streams on these special features were presented in wonderful anamorphic widescreen.
As is common with deleted scenes and alternate endings, they were worse than what ended up in the final cut of the film, but if you really like this movie, you might like to know about the other direction they were thinking about taking this film. Overall a pretty good DVD release.