Zenescope - Omnibusted #33: Final Destination

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Omnibuster.

Death never takes a vacation, Ticketholders! That is, unless he takes it from the living....

In belated honor of the release of the new Bloodlines entry, I thought I'd take a break this week (still puns!) from Grimm Fairy Tales to look at one of Zenescope Entertainment's early side projects: Final Destination!

They've done a few licensed tie-ins over the years, including Spike TV's "we have The Darwin Awards at home" masterpiece, 1,000 Ways To Die, a two-"Season" continuation of the original Charmed, and Se7en.

They even did a bit of their own, legally distinct, Final Destination-esque storytelling with the No Tomorrow series (which I will get to eventually).

But the company's short partnership with New Line Cinema began in 2006 when they released a One-Shot, limited edition comic that was bundled with seventy-five thousand release day copies of Final Destination 3 (the multiple-choice rollercoaster one) at Circuit City. It was later reprinted as bonus content in the Trade Paperback for the Final Destination: Spring Break miniseries, a.k.a. Death Never Takes A Vacation. The Trade is currently unavailable through ComiXology.

Final Destination: Sacrifice

Cover: David Seidman (The Pinocchio Collection)—C'mon; it's David Seidman. Of course it's good!

Art: John Toledo, Ed Eargle, Stefani Rennee

An emaciated man (unnamed) sits in a barren room, staring at a picture of his family and pondering his life choices.

In flashback, we see that he is the lone survivor of a horrific bus crash (a rare and unique take on the traditional Final Destination formula) thanks to your typical movie-opening vision. But this isn't the only formula twist that the short tie-in comic throws our way, as the man receives multiple visions of his subsequent deaths (being scalded to death in a factory accident, and later blown up with his family in a diner on I-80—solid nod to the franchise's recurring Flight 180 references there—courtesy of a sex offender's lit cigar and a trail of spilled gasoline) before choosing to end it all on his own terms by hanging. Of course, we know by now that his visions mean Death really wants to kill him with fire, and that means hanging probably won't work unless he's wearing a flint necklace and his roof is leaking kerosene, or his phone shorts out and his wooden house was recently varnished, or there's a methane leak into the water main running directly beneath his house, or any number of other freak sources of spontaneous combustion.

There's some decent paneling and sufficiently gory imagery that does the franchise justice, and the story is great aside from there not being more of it because most of the page count is devoted to attempts at capturing the films' Rube Goldberg flow in a chaotic collection of static images.

Final Destination

Spring Break [Cancun] OR

Death Never Takes A Vacation

For the sake of not cluttering the review with printed credits because the art team for each issue is different and I'm feeling as lazy as I am ambitious, I'm going to do this:

Whatever you call it, this miniseries looks great and has the time to feel way more like a Final Destination movie in comic book form than Sacrifice did.

After graduating from the College of St. Christopher (the patron saint of travelers—but also epileptic bachelor surfers with toothaches?—because Death is an ironic, blasphemous, contrarian dick with all the subtlety of a viral trickshot influencer), architecture student Carly Hagen and her six friends (because killing a lucky number of people is an ironic, blasphemous, contrarian dick move, and they are the boyfriend, the jock, the responsible seventh wheel, the blonde one, the other blonde one, and the guy blonde one) fly to Cancun for Spring Break (it's in the title!) on Flight 1188 (because the recurring death number in this series is based on Wild Bill Hickock's Dead Man's Hand of Aces & 8s), pay $11.88 for booze at Arrivederci Vodka, and stay in room 1188 at a fancy third-world hotel during the Ash Wednesday Carnaval on Carly's birthday.

Well, thanks to Carly having a vision where the hotel explodes from her blowing out her birthday cake during a gas leak and everyone burns, drowns, or gets crushed to death, they just get interrogated by federal agents after the building explodes without them being inside.

That means it's time for the clean-up deaths to start, and for the revelation that Carly can't just see the future; as an architecture student, she can draw it, too!

While parasailing on a boat with "White Guy" crudely painted across the bow in Spanish (and red), a series of events lead to the jock getting chopped up by the large outboard motor, and in the hospital, one of the blondes dies of mercury poisoning (and being impaled on a medical skeleton) when she takes her temperature with a broken thermometer.

This issue is the part of the movie where the characters meet other survivors and the creepy, possibly supernatural character with answers, and learn the supposed order and "design" of Death's list by means of a diagram (here, it's by superimposing Carly's premonition drawing of the hotel explosion onto a schematic of everyone's room assignments). And because either Carly or Blonde One #2 was supposed to be crushed to death by a giant South American stone sculpture in the opening vision, it makes perfect horror movie sense that the group tours some Mayan ruins. It also makes perfect horror movie sense that the guy who drowned in the vision should go scuba diving. He's next in the order, so an ancient statue and a ruptured breathing tank later, he's a human torpedo with a giant piece of glass impaling him through his mouth.

Also, the ruins are where they meet an old Shaman who talks like Gollum-Yoda.

Also again, the five remaining characters of the original seven are at a boarding terminal sometime later (Air Antigua Flight 180...with a hurricane brewing), along with their federal babysitter and two of the other survivors, one of whom looks vaguely like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo! Carly feels Death's wind or something, and she and her friends barely escape the carnage of an errant forklift while the other three get impaled and crushed.

This is the part of the movie where everyone agrees to stick together in one, death-proofed location (not that Death is letting them leave Cancun anyway), but they're too paranoid, frightened, selfish, and horror movie stupid for that to last more than five minutes. Also, in 2006, Carly perfectly replicated and animated a 3D model of the forklift accident on her laptop in her sleep, so every animation and gaming company on Earth should be lining up at her door if she survives this series. And I forgot to mention at the beginning that she also made herself a peace sign necklace, which comes in handy as a premonition device when Blonde #2 gets trapped in a swimming pool and drowns in a very peace sign-like pose. This freaks Blonde, But A Guy out, and I don't know for sure what the premonition sign was, but he runs off and burns to death from taking a Roman Candle to the dick.

And with that, Final Destination: Spring Break [Cancun], Death Never Takes A Vacation, has reached its final destination, and it's very stupid and very Zenescope. All that's left now are Carly, Boyfriend, and Extra Wheel. And because Death is ready to come fast and hard (I said what I said), the trio attempt to escape by taking a helicopter out of the hurricane (resulting in a spray of Boyfriend Burger and the helicopter exploding), and hiding in a boiler room and a funeral parlor (Extra Wheel gets crushed and impaled while riding out the hurricane in a coffin).

Now for the part where I said this was very Zenescope, because the ending pulls almost every Grimm Fairy Tales trick in the book aside from having Sela or Belinda show up. Apparently, Carly is Death, or a reincarnation of the Mayan moon goddess Ixchel (here mistakenly rendered as "Xi Chel"), or their descendant, or their tool or avatar or something, and the creepy, one-eyed shaman sucks her into a mirror like it's Wonderland. The end, do not pass Go, do not collect $1,188.

After the movie that inspired this licensing deal had such a cool, dark ending, I expected something more spectacular that was truer to the spirit of the movies than to the imprint, but as a fan of the franchise, I'm happy to say that up to that point, the Spring Break miniseries really felt like a Final Destination movie in printed form.

Were the deaths kind of repetitive? Yes (explosion, drowning, impalement, crushing). Were there some frames missing, so to speak? Yes. But for the most part, the action was easy to follow, and the art was really good for a year two Zenescope project; better even than some of the stuff I've read lately from the 2010s.

If you're unable to turn your brain down a bit and not let the stupid keep you from having some macabre fun, these comics and movies may not be your cup of mercury-and-glass tea. But if you appreciate horror for the gifts that stupidity brings (like maybe Elon Musk taking a chainsaw to the face, RFK giving himself ebola to prove his vaccine claims, or Trump being crushed by his own name falling out of the sky...not that I'm giving anyone ideas), pay attention to your dreams and book a flight for Final Destination.

Tomorrow is Juneteenth, Ticketholders, so TBT '25 is taking a week off for a Just the Ticket review of Sinners, followed on Friday by my thoughts on the latest Final Destination entry: Bloodlines. Please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can stop avoiding the inevitable, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Omnibuster,

Out of visions.