While movies like Avatar and Coraline are giving 3D movies a real sense of artistic credibility that they lacked back when they were first introduced as a gimmick, it’s not surprising that the gimmick would be resurrected in an attempt to help bolster flagging franchises like the Final Destinationfilms. Bonus points for the opening credit sequence that seems to revisit some of the more gnarly and elaborate ways people died in the previous films—if you’re going to reboot a franchise, very nice to at least tip the hat the old flicks without feeling obliged to remake them completely.

Available to own on DVD and Blu-Ray this week (and also available on various video-on-demand channels),The Final Destination is the fourth installment of the series and the first filmed in 3D—which has a bit more bearing on the plot than you might imagine. In the previous installments, it was always my understanding that things just…happened. That accidents occurred and that the universe only got mean-spirited and started to operate with a free will after the heroes of the films had escaped death as the result of a last-second premonition by one of the characters. This film, however, sees things starting to move in a very unnatural way from the beginning—with a screw twisting all on its own, setting the stage for a grandstand collapse at a stock car race—and I can’t help but wonder if that particular visual cue was added to accommodate the 3D format. If it was, it certainly changed the nature of the series’ antagonist in a way that’s very big, even if it didn’t look it.

That said, the 3D effects probably enhance this movie more than most. The series, after all, has basically eaten its lunch on being nothing but a series of increasingly incredible, elaborate and often comical deaths and Rube Goldberg traps, one after another, jolting that terrible part of the viewer’s imagination that wants to see something horrible happen to the jerk sitting two rows behind them at the race, yelling at people. To see it in 3D only makes it that much more real, and in a movie where realism is really one of the only things it has going for it with its own target demographic, that’s huge. Compare it to something like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs or Avatar, which would be visually stunning even without the 3D, and you see why this was a great place to use the technology (even if seeing a 3D rendering of somebody dying in exactly the same way Paris Hilton bit it in House of Wax isn’t nearly as entertaining without the victim being Hilton). It’s too bad, then, that many of the 3D segments are badly-rendered CGI that make anyone watching without the glasses go, “Ew! This is what 3D does to a movie?”

The characters are typically obnoxious and myopic, making their deaths—except, of course, for the main character’s and his girlfriend’s—seem predestined just by virtue of genre awareness. People who call Professor X “Doctor Xaver” and sneak Jim Beam around in their binoculars are bound to die horribly in horror films. And, of course, just about anyone who says “nigger” in modern American pop culture is just begging to bite it by being dragged behind a pickup while “Why Can’t We Be Friends” is playing.

That said, the movie itself is pretty enjoyable. Like its prequels, it’s a bit silly and preoposterous but entertaining, in that “I can’t believe I’m watching it” way. The biggest fault with the film is that the “nice guy” lead actor is awful, which of course makes it harder to watch him. That’s tough when everyone else is so shallow and awful that the nice guy would usually be a much-needed break from the monotony. Tougher, still, when you’re supposed to take his long, emotional monologues seriously.