The Daily Stream: Sole Survivor Is The Proto-Final Destination Nightmare For Your Watchlist
(Welcome to The Daily Stream, an ongoing series in which the /Film team shares what they've been watching, why it's worth checking out, and where you can stream it.)
The Movie: "Sole Survivor"
Where You Can Stream It: Shudder
The Pitch: Among the five installments (soon to be six) of the celebrated "Final Destination" franchise, one maxim sits at the core of every elaborate death contained therein, summed up by Tony Todd's Bludworth: "In death, there are no accidents, no coincidences, no mishaps, and no escapes." When someone escapes death — say, a plane crash that kills everyone else on board — the resident Reaper figure of the franchise explains that near-death experiences are something like bugs in a system that, in the end, always gets their man. Death as an active enforcer was a hit concept for these movies, but "Sole Survivor" was playing in the same sandbox decades ago.
Once your number is up, the Death of "Final Destination" and company uses anything at its earthly disposal to collect, from tanning beds to elevators to pool drains. While these movies focus on Rube Goldberg-esque series' of unfortunate events to shuffle their victims off the mortal coil, Thom Eberhardt's 1984 feature-length creeper uses the dead as pawns on the chessboard. Some emerge from a mass casualty event with a sense of invincibility, but Denise Watson (Anita Skinner), the sole survivor of the title, feels anything but safe when zombies begin popping up like Cenobites, ready to usher her beyond the veil. Genre streaming giant Shudder, which also houses Daily Stream recommendations like Travis Stevens' "A Wounded Fawn," hosts this ethereal variation on the "Death manifested" idea.
Why it's essential viewing
Eberhardt's feature debut (before "Night of the Comet" the following year) has the cerebral lingering power of Herk Harvey's "Carnival of Souls" or Williard Huyck's "Messiah of Evil," with uncanny imagery of its walking dead and its ever-present orchestrations of dread. Perhaps its patient cadence was too slow for audiences in 1984, accounting for its obscurity in a decade filled with deadly zombie pictures like the following year's "Return of the Living Dead." After TV producer Denise survives a plane crash, she finds herself pursued by weird-looking, hollow-eyed strangers in public. She quickly discerns that something supernatural is after her, a concern dismissed by others as mental distress. Meanwhile, the threat grows.
Denise tells her doctor boyfriend a story of a time when a glitch worked out in her favor and she didn't get charged for a dress she bought. She tells him this as she ruminates on her complicated feelings as the one who walked away from the wreckage when everyone else perished horribly. He tries to assuage her dread — which she differentiates from simple survivor's guilt — by reminding her that she essentially got a free dress, since the seller never charged her. "Yes, they did," Denise corrects him. She follows it up with a proto version of Bludhorn's "no escapes" maxim: "It's those damn computers. They made a mistake. But sooner or later, they'll find you."
"They" in this case means the recently deceased — so recent that they are found by police with their blood pooled in their legs, as though they had been upright after death. This makes for some tremendous scares as vacant-faced cadavers stalk Denise to finish off what her fateful flight started. Come for the undead repo people, stay for an unhinged Caren Larkey performance as a psychic with a great character payoff in the finale. Her Bludhorn moment: "You cannot stop it, and anyone who stands in its way, or finds out, or even remotely suspects it, they will be dealt with."