I’ll just say it. While other Horror franchises take turns getting accolades and being panned, Final Destination movies were content to kill under the radar…consistently. The films walk their own path, wrapped up in lore while killing morally sketchy characters in wonderfully darkly silly ways. But death can’t hide in the shadows forever; if Bloodlines isn’t the best movie in the series, it’s in the top 2, reminding everyone 14 years later, to still not mess with Death’s plan.
Except Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) doesn’t mess with death’s design. Her grandmother Iris (Brec Bassinger) did, saving a bunch of people from horrific deaths from a restaurant in the sky tragedy. Iris’s memory has given Stefani constant nightmares, forcing her to go back home from college. After a cold shoulder from her dad Marty (Tinpo Lee) and brother Charlie (Teo Briones), Stefani searches for answers from her uncle Howard Campbell (Alex Zahara) and her cousins (Richard Harmon, Anna Lore, Owen Patrick Joyner). Oh, and she’s probably gonna run into William Bludworth (Tony Todd) who can fill her in on Death’s design.
The creative team behind Bloodlines should be called the revampers, because of how many film franchises they restarted (Spiderman, Scream, Dracula). Fans of the previous generations of films, these people understand the essence of what makes the franchises work, and come in with a fresh new idea to restart it. By the end of Final Destination 5 14 years ago, we had come full circle and exhausted all the ideas in that run of films. 14 years have given writers Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor time to think of new lore to inject. It’s that lore injection that’s necessary for a Final Destination to sustain setpiece to setpiece, and provide any sort of emotional resonance to the movie. The spin the writers choose here is really emotionally clever, sneaking in themes of cycle of family pain and how to sacrifice for the greater good. Most importantly, in his last role, Tony Todd, literally near death himself when he filmed, gets a glorious swan song, mic drop moment, walking off into the sunset finishing tying 25 years of these films together with his perfectly cast presence. If you at all like these movies, Todd is probably a big part of it, so it’s fitting he get the right send off, with the best message of the movie.
But Final Destination movies get ranked based on how incredible their demented Rube Goldberg death sequences work. Each film has a standout: the OG plane, the 2nd’s log truck car crash, the 3rd’s tanning bed, the 4th the Mall Escalator, and the 5th the eye doctor. For Bloodlines it’s the opening sequence at the Sky View, a masterclass directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein deliver with aplomb. The scene starts the movie’s trend of working in real life fears with darkly funny punchlines and over the top gore. That first sequence alone gets more than a few sorts of normal fears: glass floors in the sky, tableside flambe’ s , getting hit with objects from the sky, etc. Inside of that sequence we get the classic Final Destination misdirects, and following around an innocuous item as it slowly wreaks havoc. Most importantly, the death sequences get increasingly hilariously over the top, knowing that part of the fun of a Final Destination film is that these aren’t real people: they’re almost part of the Rube Goldberg device, needing to be killed to complete the machine. Despite that being the peak though, the movie smartly keeps us moving from one sequence to the next, using other common day to day fears and that general understanding of 25 years of Final Destination kills to deliver the disturbed magic. The best of the rest include a wonderfully ludicrous hospital sequence (the runner up), a tattoo parlor, and a BBQ party. This film knows Final Destinations are best when they’re funny, and the jokes in this movie are some of the best in the series, like a truly evil tease that the writers amusingly write away from and my favorite: one of the best ways to get “passed over” by death that legitimately had me scare the theater with how hard I bellowed.
Walking out of Final Destination Bloodlines, the escalator riding down made a really weird sound. And because of what I just watched, a mischievous smile appeared on my face, wondering if death was coming for me. The review is here, so I guess that death passed me by. But who knows? Bloodlines certainly made me look a little closer at the seeming randomness around me to make sure I’m not about to be impaled by a movie projector, or run over by a Chicago Trolley on a pub crawl, or whatever sinister funny joke the universe might have waiting for me.