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Starring Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten, Nick Zano and Haley Webb. Directed by David R. Ellis. 82minutes. At major theatres. 18A

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A cold premonition coiled its way up my spine Friday when I discovered, almost too late, that I had inadvertently purchased a $6 matinee ticket to the non-3-D version of The Final Destination, the fourth – and, because of the ominously climactic definitive article in the title, presumably the last – instalment in the movie franchise that pits clueless American teenagers against the cunning wiles of deadly Destiny.

It suddenly occurred to me that this wouldn’t be the first movie in which 3-D is used to disguise a dog’s breakfast, or at least to distract the audience from dwelling on its less savoury contents. And I’m here to tell you that the additional $3 investment is worth every penny.

Without the 3-D effects and the deadly objects (knives, car engine blocks, nails, flames) flying off the screen and into your eyeballs, The Final Destination would be a sad and dreary bit of business.

And that’s a bit of a disappointment to a serious movie consumer whose interest in the novelty elements of the first two films – directed, respectively, by James Wong and David R. Ellis, who also directed No. 4 – was piqued by the imaginative use of contrivances that fuel the admittedly silly conceit: those who cheat death only set themselves up for more elaborate, gruesome and surprising endings.

The guilty pleasure is not in gore but in the inventiveness – and sense of humour – in setting up the death sequences that are the horror-sideshow high points in each film. In The Final Destination it seems Ellis and screenwriter Eric Bress, who worked on FD2 as well, couldn’t get the juices flowing.

This time it’s Nick O’Bannon (Bobby Campo) who’s burdened with premonitions of death after a near escape, with his girlfriend Lori (Shantel Yvonne VanSanten) and homies Janet (Haley Webb) and Hunt (Nick Zano), from a catastrophic racecar meet, where a loose screwdriver originates a series of dazzling, 3-D-perfect pile-ups, explosions and the destruction of the concrete stadium.

Too soon, Nick figures that maybe death can be thwarted if the sequence of the demise of intended victims can be altered. Of course, those who ignore his warnings meet colourful and horrific ends, but, with one exception the mechanics of the death set-ups in The Final Destination are trite, predictable and lack the skewed comic sensibility that made at least a couple of its predecessors more interesting than your average splatter flick.

In this one, the jolts are in the 3-D trickery. And those thrills evaporate the minute you recycle your glasses at the exit.