Something is askew.

There should have been no doubt that “The Final Destination” was awful. No one expected the ritualized blood, guts and gore to be a symphony of cinematic expertise. And when you’re handed 3-D glasses, it doesn’t exactly say, “We feel the strength of this movie rests on its story.” “Jaws 3,” anyone?

But I left the theater gobsmacked by something far more horrific than the horrible acting and single use of the n-word.

Perhaps I’m wrong — and I’m almost certain I am — but this film might just be the most subtly executed satire of the summer season. Hell, of this year.

You know how the story goes: Kids and other people end up in group activity. Group activity goes horribly wrong. One kid — in this case, Nick O’Bannon (Bobby Campo, “Greek”) — foresees event. Stops death. Death then picks them off in the order of their original death.

There’s never been any great variation in these pieces and it doesn’t change much here.

Yet, since every tiny bit of this movie is constructed to irritate the viewer in as many ways as possible — plot, character development, sheer absurdity, etc. — one almost has to think that director David R. Ellis (best-known for his stuntwork, not his directing) and the screenwriters actually planned for it to be this laughably bad. And not just in the usual “horror-turned-unintentional-comedy” way.

You don’t feel bad watching these goons twist in the wind and get killed in horrible ways; you feel bad about America. And maybe that’s the subtext of the movie — sometimes, natural selection just needs a hand in this country.

First off, the major death event comes at a NASCAR event. I can’t think of another sporting event as representative of everything that’s wrong with the Stars and Stripes than NASCAR — conspicuous oil consumption, advertising, beer, repeated senseless accidents and the South.

But if that wasn’t bad enough, then comes the menagerie of American failure. Our victims are a white supremacist tow truck operator, an auto mechanic with a wife who prefers the sounds of her iPod to the racetrack, an insensitive “bro” with a whiny ex-girlfriend, an occasionally suicidal, recovering alcoholic security guard (who also is black and subject to an attempted cross-burning) and a MILF with two bratty kids.

While death pushes the envelope as to how these lovely slices of American pie get sliced, the difference from the other films is that these deaths are, for the most part, contingent on their own stupidity. In many ways, death is sort of like an omniscient Oompa-Loompa — every death can be interpreted as a moral about boneheaded Americans. “Well, you wouldn’t have died if you didn’t hate kids/hate blacks/follow safety regulations/be a cowboy.”

And frankly, the film comes close to pulling off a nice horror film social commentary (sort of like “Dawn of Dead” on consumerism or “Scream” on other horror films.) Sure, it’s basically “America kind of sucks, doesn’t it?”, but at least they make their point clear and give a solution, right?

Well, that’s the last place where the line between deliberate idiocy and unintentional goofs is clear.

The lineage of death, which was so much the focus of the previous films and the basis of its built-in mythology, falls apart here. Death doesn’t move as methodically in this chapter. Whereas the other films have made the order of deaths the integral (read: only) part of their plot, the result in this film is that none of it really mattered in the first place. Sure, there are premonitions and races to figure out who’s going to die next, but the last 15 minutes of this film basically consist of death giving his victims (and the audience) the middle finger by rendering the concept of a list irrelevant. Come on, death kills whoever he wants; did you think he needed ground rules?

If “The Final Destination” fails outright as a horror and just misses the bar as comedy, the filmmakers should at least be commended for the 3-D effect. It was gimmicky, but not for the sake of the gimmick. Every death utilized it, making sure that every fountain of blood, car crash and decapitation was flying right at you. Plus, the metatheatre of having a major death scene take place during a 3-D feature is just cheeky and makes you believe the director really tried to make this film incredibly awful (especially when 3-D glasses are just modified, oversized sunglasses, which works with the “Ugh, America” theme.).

So maybe this film isn’t quite to the level of self-aware parody yet, but it’s close enough to make for an enjoyable laugh and a study in American self-loathing.

Perhaps the fifth installment will cash in on that idea by replacing the horror film score with Looney Tunes music?

2 stars out of 5.