Sole Survivor

Anita Skinner plays Denise Watson, who works on TV commercials for a living. One day, she survives an airplane crash, the sole survivor of the story, and everything after that becomes hell for her. For one, she keeps seeing visions of strange people who appear to be the dead that have risen from their graves. Soon these corpses stop just being scary and become homicidal, and Denise is on their hit-list.
I first heard of this film in Rue Morgue Magazine many years ago, as it apparently had influenced the Final Destination films, which I’ve personally never liked. And yes, there is some similarities. The story in Sole Survivor is basically the same: someone escapes death, and death wants her back. Although unlike the FD films, where death is an invisible character causing things to happen, death here takes the presence of the recently dead, reanimated corpses that are hell bent on bringing Denise back to life. The best sequences are the surreal ones. There are a lot of very dream-like shots involving these corpses, but more impressive is the dream sequence the unhinged psychic actress (who warns Denise about what’s going to happen) has where Denise seems to be sitting in he plane seat, and among her are the littered corpses and wreckage of the plane. It’s very well shot, and are the goriest scenes in the film.
Sadly the movie isn’t really that great. The acting is not very good, and the kills are very dull, the least interesting one being the pool drowning. There are also some ridiculous sequences that have nothing to do with the plot, such as the random strip poker scene. Now, I’m not against showing tits, especially if they’re Scream Queen’s Brinke Stevens’ tits, but for a movie that tries being so serious and dreamlike, a scene like this sort of comes out randomly and half assed. So in the end, I would only recommend this as a film that pre-dates a lot of today’s horror practices, but as a stand-alone film, not so much.