The plot in a nutshell
It's been one year to the day since several students and their teacher survived the crash of flight 180, only to all die painfully shortly thereafter.  The anniversary is marked by another teen, this time a young woman, foreseeing the death of a group of people, herself and her friends included, in a huge pileup on the expressway.  Blocking the entrance ramp with her SUV, she saves the lives of a half dozen people, only to find themselves as cursed as the survivors of flight 180, hunted down by a Death who doesn't take kindly to being cheated.

Not so here of course, but they manage to make the deaths at least unique.  This is not a flick for the squeamish though, and each death is more gruesome than the previous.  Not only that, but the use of high technology means that each is more realistic than past films.  We've seen a guy sliced clean through many times before (heck, poor Darth Maul suffered that fate), but this is the first time I've seen the internal organs, including the intestines, come falling out as the pieces slide away.

The plot is as silly as the first film, but I can live with that.  Sure, it looks like the writers were big fans of the game Mousetrap when they were kids, and it's hard to believe that Death would have to resort to such intricate machinations just to kill off a handful of boneheads.  But in the first film, if you could get past that plot conundrum, the rest of the film held together pretty well.  Unfortunately, that's not the case here.

I'll discuss a few of the deaths and the issues I had with them in more detail in the Spoilers section, but let's just say that several of them were just silly.  They looked pretty good on film, but don't spend more than five seconds thinking about it our you'll realize just how implausible they are, or why they don't even make sense within the context of the film.

I will give them this though - the transfer and sound are really excellent.  The film was crystal clear and crisp on my RPTV, and the DTS ES 6.1 soundtrack took full advantage of all the surrounds.  The big crash scene at the beginning was particularly effective, but even ambient mood sounds were present in almost every scene.

Rating - Very Qualified Rent It
If you didn't like the first film, stay very far away from this one.  It's more of the same, with less originality.  However, if you are a fan of B horror, just looking for a fun little flick to pass 90 minutes, you could certainly do worse.  It's not a movie I'll watch again, nor one I'd even buy just for the cool sound track, but it was worth it to me to see it once.

Spoiler Laden Thoughts
I've got lots to spoil - and whine about...

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Is it just me, or does how they beat Death in this film make absolutely no sense?  The pregnant woman as a red herring made less sense, since it's pretty obvious that for every person that's born someone doesn't die (it's a little thing called population growth).  Let's not even go down the road where this film is saying the baby isn't 'alive' until it's birth.  I would have preferred if they'd worked out some weird way to make the birth actually work, but instead all it took was for one to die...and be resurrected.

But how did this actually stop Death's plan?  Okay, I can buy that it would skip the person doing the dying.  Hey, they died, and it's not Death's fault someone managed to pull them back from the bright light.  But why would that mean the next person down the list still wouldn't get the axe (or drain pipe) in the head?

The flaws in this film start pretty early.  The girl sees a lot happen between entering the freeway and the accident - she passes the other cars or is passed by them, there's the whole cop-is-following-us- and-we're-smoking-a-joint joke to get by, and it takes quite some time for the accident.  However, when it actually  happens, the truck hauling the logs barely gets past the on ramp before the big spill.  I can go along with the idea that Death altered his plan to try to snag a few people still on the ramp, and that shows some creativity on his part, but it was still distracting since it wasn't obvious at first.

Most of the deaths are pretty obvious, something that wasn't true with every one in the first film.  The only really surprising death was the pipe through the head, although I'm a little confused why the air bag didn't go off when the accident first occurred, and why a front airbag went off when they were hitting the side of the car.

I also found it interesting that Death actually managed to use them to kill one of their own.  Nora, the mother of the boy killed at the dentist office, wouldn't have died at that particular time had it not been for them.  They saw the 'sign' of the man with hooks (a plant by Death of course), they called her, she dropped the phone, getting her hair caught in the hooks, and then running scared.  Had they not seen that 'sign', it wouldn't have occurred that way.  I was disappointed that they didn't point out to each other that they'd been used.

Yes, this film had even more plot holes than the first, so turning off your brain will be a requirement.  But if you're just looking for a Faces of Death style film, with a threadbare story to hold it together, this might be just what the doctor ordered.