I'm not a horror buff. In fact, I don't care much about horror films in the least. That's why you won't see me doing too many of these Retro Cinema posts during our month-long Halloween celebration. I also don't own many DVDs. I just don't buy them. Ever. But I own Final Destination. Why? Well, the reason I own the DVD is a long story – I didn't run out and buy it because I love it – but I have held onto it, because I do have a real soft spot for the movie and its sequels (such simple titles: Final Destination 2 and Final Destination 3).

Much of my, let's call it tolerance, of Final Destination has to do with my fascination with Rube Goldebergian chain reactions. Other horror films may have their foreshadowing and suspense, but many of the deaths in Final Destination consist of an intricate path of destruction. For example, one woman is killed by her carelessness to pour freezer-kept vodka into a very hot mug. As expected, the mug cracks, the vodka spills onto the floor, making it slippery, some of the liquid falls into a computer monitor, which blows up in her face, etc. By the end of the scene, the woman is lying on the floor of a kitchen aflame, she has kitchen knives sticking into all parts of her body and certainly there's no other explanation for her demise than it being an elaborate, freak accident.

Well, it looks like the studios are hoping to cash in early on the buzz surrounding big-budget musicals like Hairspray and are snagging any property with so much as a single dance number. Variety is reporting that Mary Elizabeth Winstead has just signed to star in the dance film Make It Happen. Written by the same man who brought us Save the Last Dance (or as I liked to call it, White Girls Can Jump) and Step Up, the pic will be directed by Darren Grant (Diary of a Mad Black Woman) and will tell the story of a small town girl (Winstead) who heads to the big city for a professional dancing career only to wind up working a Burlesque house. But since the film will be aimed at teens, I'm guessing the burlesque will be more like a Pussycat Dolls routine than anything R-rated.

Winstead's career has been building steam over the past couple of years after some relatively high-profile roles -- including supporting parts in Bobby, Black Christmas, Factory Girl, and Grindhouse -- and while she didn't have the biggest role in Tarantino's Death Proof, I'm sure the sight of her in a cheerleader outfit managed to stick in the minds of a few of the audience members. Winstead will also be back in theaters this summer as John McClane's daughter in Live Free or Die Hard. You may remember that, at the Grindhouse junket, Winstead revealed to us that she'd have some ass-kicking to do in the film -- she won't just be a damsel in distress. Make It Happen looks to be Winstead's first foray into dancing but since she is a child star I'm sure there have been some dance lessons somewhere in her past. Production on Make It Happen is set to start this July, plenty of time to brush on a few steps if need be.

I have an issue with year-end best-of lists. Or, I should say I have an issue with making them, myself. Every year I think about giving in to the tradition, but then I stop myself when I realize that I haven't seen enough movies. There are the last-minute releases of late December to wait for. There are films I missed earlier in the year that haven't yet arrived on DVD. And ever since I took a hiatus from reviewing films, it has gotten worse, because I see fewer movies than I normally do. Typically I don't discover my favorite pic of a given year until the following year or later.

So, rather than write up a list that may change tomorrow or the next day or 10 years from now, I've decided to reflect on the bad movies I saw. I've definitely seen more bad movies than good movies, anyway. But rather than make a list of the worst of '06 -- I probably haven't seen the real worst any more than I've seen the best -- I fondly recalled the movies that were crap, but were enjoyable, nonetheless.

Some of the movies on my list are wholly guilty pleasures, while others have one or two specific aspects that I found more guiltily pleasurable than the movie itself.

• 10.) Cobra Starship's 'Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)' video from Snakes on a Plane - Sure, Snakes on a Plane is a guilty pleasure -- it was made to be. But it is just too obvious to mention it as a whole, and anyway it really wasn't as enjoyable as it should have been or was meant to be. The music video during the movie's credits, though, is another story. In my opinion it overshadows the actual movie by a long shot. It may be as self-consciously intent on producing irony and camp, but it succeeds where SOAP doesn't. Maybe because it is catchy, maybe because the band looks like a parody of contemporary hipster bands, or maybe because it is shorter -- I am far more likely to return to the video for a good laugh than to the movie (not that I'll turn off the movie on a lazy Sunday with nothing better to do; it is still a guilty pleasure, itself).

A few days ago, Slither-maker James Gunn mentioned on his MySpace page that his adorably splattery sci-fi horror rom-com was the receipient of four Fangoria Chainsaw Award nominations. My response was "Hey, cool. Where are the rest of the nominations?!?!?" And now, a few days later, here they are. Neat-o.

Although Fangoria has been doing their annual Chainsaw awards for over a decade now, 2006 marks the very first time the event will be televised, much to the delight of zombie freaks and slasher geeks all over North America. The event will be held in L.A. on October 15th, although the Fuse Network won't be airing it until the 22nd. (Which means if you want to watch the event "un-spoiled," I wish you luck.) Want to throw your own votes into the tally? Fine. You can vote right here, but only between September 1st and 13th (which is a Friday, mwaahaaa!)

After the jump you'll find a complete list of all the 2006 Chainsaw nominees, plus my own predictions on which flicks would win if the event were called Amazing Geek Weinberg's Horror Awards instead of The Chainsaws.

It seems a  fairly obvious observation, but horror flicks are pretty "hot" these days. The current cycle of scary flicks can be attributed to box office hits like Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, Marcus Nispel's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, James Wan's Saw, and probably a half-dozen others, but moreso than any other genre, the popularity of horror movies seems to arrive in "waves." Apparently we're knee-deep in one of those waves right now. And now with one quarter of 2006 behind us, it's time for the first of four "progress reports," in which you and I wade through all the horror flicks presented in January, February, and March, and then decide if the studios and the indies have been treating the Gorehounds kindly.

1/6/06 -- BloodRayne (Romar) -- Kristanna Loken, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Rodriguez, and Michael Madsen humiliate themselves through the latest hilariously bad offering from the adorably inept filmmaker known as Uwe Boll. (It's a horror movie in that it features vampires -- and it's an absolute horror to sit through.) Jam-packed with laughable dialogue, dime-store costumes, non-sensical plot-churnings, and hyper-inept editing, BloodRayne is the kind of flick that should be required viewing for any and all film students. It's precisely the sort of movie that's so bad it's good -- although I suspect Boll is beginning to do "amazingly awful" on purpose, which sort of takes some of the fun out of it... Grade: D- (DVD release: 5-23)

New Line has something pretty darn fancy in store for Final Destination 3 fans (I'll refrain from my customary snide remark about just how many of those people there are, because the movie was surprisingly well-reviewed, and people actually went to see it) when the DVD comes out this summer. Not content to just offer commentary and a making-of documentary (both which will be part of the two disc package), New Line has created a choose-you-own-adventure-style version of of the film, offering choices that extend well beyond picking one of two different endings. According to Variety, additional scenes were written and shot -- to the tune of around $1 million in additional cost -- and viewers will have "seven choices at 10-minute intervals," each of which consists of two options. (Not to worry, purists: you can still watch the movie in its theatrical form, if you prefer.)

New Line is really raising the Special Edition bar with this (costly, attention-grabbing) gimmick -- I bet a lot of studio heads are hoping that the disc fails to sell, just to save themselves the headache of trying to put together similarly slick features for their own releases.

As if we needed more evidence that the entire nation has gone insane, Steve Martin's critically-derided The Pink Panther remake opened this weekend at the top of the box office rankings, beating out Final Destination 3's $20 million by about $1.5 million. (Ok, confession time: did you go see Pink Panther? Could you explain why? Please?) Final Destination did, however, open on many fewer screens that Martin's film, and it actually made almost $1000 more/screen than the comedy. Filling out the top four were the weekend's other two debuts: Curious George, which took in $15.3 million, and old man Ford's latest action flick, Firewall, which made just under $14 million.

The fifth spot was held down by When a Stranger Calls, which was down over 50% from its opening weekend but still managed to earn about $10 million. Landing in the sixth and seventh spots, meanwhile, were two films in their third week of release, both of which lost about 50% from last weekend's returns: the inexplicable Big Momma's House 2 made slightly less than $7 million, while Emma Thompson's Nanny McPhee took in $5.2 million. Filling out the top 10 were a pair of films well into their third month of release (Brokeback Mountain, Hoodwinked), and the rapidly-fading Underworld: Evolution. Complete numbers are after the jump.

Four bigass releases this weekend, none of which seem to be very good - unless, that is, you're a preschooler, a rabid Harrison Ford fan, a crazy person, or a teenager into death-by-nailgun. Of course, millions of people will ignore critics and flock to the movies, thus causing yet another Final Destination to be made, and Ford to do action movies well into his 80s. The Pink Panther, though, is dead in the water. Sorry, Steve.

• Curious George: Several surprised critics - our own James Rocchi among them - found themselves impressed by the charm and ease of this effort. As Robert Ebert (who somehow managed to work a Walt Whitman quote into his review) points out, however, Curious George is definitely made for children, and many (presumably) adult viewers found themselves understandably bored by the movie.

• Firewall: Though pretty much no one (apart from James and the always-unpredictable Roger Ebert) really liked this one, it nevertheless prompted a handful of critics to unusual moments of creativity. To wit: Ty Burr of the Boston Globe suggests a pair of alternate titles (Proxy Server!, SOCKS Protocol), Mick LaSalle confesses his secret Harrison Ford-watching technique (he pretends all of Ford's characters are just one guy with a really, really stressful life), while Manohla Dargis indulges in a fairly apt Ford career summary.

• The Pink Panther: Shock of shocks, the movie mostly sucks. Hands up if you knew that when the first trailer came out last year. Yeah, that's all of you. Sadly for most of the nation's critics, however, they actually had to see the movie before they wrote their reviews. In case you really, really want to see it, good reviews can be found, but even those contain phrases like "Farcical mayhem" and "...a pleasant surprise, if not quite a golden goose." The most faint praise, however, comes from Ty Burr, who I swear is not paying me off. In his review, he gleefully reports that "this new version of the misadventures of Inspector Clouseau...isn't a black hole of unfunniness." Wow, get me a ticket to that one!

• Final Destination 3: While no one claims this one is very good, more than a few critics found themselves enjoying what they panned because of the film's abundant clever humor (even if the humor does happen to revolve around death). The best line of all comes from Kyle Smith of The New York Post, who sums the movie's attitude up in two, gleeful words: "Yay Death!"

Sometimes after two tragic events occur simultaneously, we find ourselves anxiously, though not hopefully, awaiting a third accident to corroborate the old saying, "bad things happen in threes." Suddenly we're paying more attention to the news, weighing the seriousness of each disaster in order to qualify it as the completing incident. Likely, that last piece of the triumvirate is less significant than the previous two, and it would barely register if not for our seeking it out, but it is put into the group not so much to conclude any real linkage but to fill a void that exists only in our mind's determination to associate.

Final Destination 3, a horror sequel concerned with the overzealous search for clues and connections, correlates with this idea on many levels. As a forced, unnecessary addition to the series, it lacks a satisfying relationship to its predecessors while simply rehashing the original's plot with an exaggeration of its ideas. It exists merely to fulfill a demand for trilogy.  

As you perhaps have noticed, winter is a very, VERY slow time when it comes to free screenings. Apparently studios only careabout us during the summer, when people are so bored, and so desperate for air condition, that they'll sit through anything. However, thanks to JoBlo, who unearthed this Final Destination 3 screening, we've got a nice, popcorn sequel for your mid-winter view pleasure.

All of the screenings are on February 8 at 7pm; the links below will get you a ticket. Whether you get a seat depends on how early you're willing to show up to stand in line.

• Atlanta
• Boston
• Chicago
• Cleveland
• Dallas
• Denver
• Detroit
• Houston
• Los Angeles
• Miami
• Minneapolis
• New York
• Orlando
• Philadelphia
• Phoenix
• Portland, OR
• Sacramento
• San Diego
• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Washington DC

If you've seen either of the first two Final Destination flicks, you'll most likely remember the weirdly creepy morgue attendant played by actor Tony Todd. Well, Final Destination 3 is in gear now, and while said morgue attendant will not be making an appearance in the third film of the franchise, co-writer and director James Wong is pleased to annouce that Todd will have a part to play – and a unique one at that. You know how these stories play out: a group of people escape what was supposed to be their proper moment of death, and death hunts them down one by one to make things right. In round three, death was supposed to befall a group of amusement park-goers by means of a roller coaster accident. The coaster is called "Devil's Flight," and a huge devil with a creepy voice is the park's way of luring riders on board. The devil is voiced by – you guessed it – Tony Todd!

As I've admitted here before, I'm not a huge horror film buff. Mind you, I'm not opposed to them in any way – I just don't particularly enjoy them. I did see the original Final Destination (mostly by accident) and as far as these things go, I enjoyed it. It had good pacing and kept a high level of tension without feeling overly forced. I have no idea what the sequel was like, however, and thus have no idea what to expect from the continuation of the franchise. Horror fans, this is where you jump to my assistance.