The fourth entry in New Line Cinema’s health and safety lecture series opens with a pile-up at a stock car race that foreshadows the car crash to come.

After scaling the heights of Final Destination 3 (insofar as it was a film that was enjoyable to watch), the franchise takes a step backwards in this 2009 effort. As the title suggests, The Final Destination (3D) marks an unwelcome return to the more sombre tone of the original, but with added racial dimensions (including burning crosses and lynching imagery) that make the film more KKK rally than NASCAR rally.

The black character (Mykelti Williamson) even tries to sacrifice himself to save the awful white people, whose complete absence of characterisation makes the stereotypes of FD3 look comparatively three-dimensional. The movie abandons the campy fun and satirical aspects of its predecessor, its closest attempt at a joke being a 3D film called Love Lays Dying, which one character says “sounds like a chick flick.” You know all those 3D chick flicks you get.

But the movie’s biggest crime is botching the trademark kill sequences, only one of which (the salon scene) has the twisted visual wit that makes them entertaining. A deadly car wash encounter could have been this instalment’s version of part 3‘s tanning bed kill, but fails to make slowly rotating bits of cloth seem threatening, while the cop-out ending looks like they ran out of budget at the last minute.

And since the best moments are lost without the 3D effect in the cinema, The Final Destination is simply a bad disaster movie whose 79 minutes feel like a slog.