Two things have always separated the Final Destination films from other horror franchises. First, the villain (Death) is never seen, only experienced—there are no clever quips or certain types of victims he pursues—it’s simply anyone who has someone escaped his grasp once and is due to die. And second, that Death isn’t a slasher—he goes after people using the most elaborate means necessary to stage his work like a freak accident. Sometimes you see it coming, and other times, the dominoes that fall result in a brutal, messy execution that is so long, you have no idea what the means of destruction will be or from which direction it will come. And when the filmmakers get it right and actually plot out these Rube Goldberg machines of mayhem, the results are spectacular.
Case in point, this sixth chapter in the 25-year-old franchise, Final Destination Bloodlines, which begins at the beginning in 1968, with an wild nightmare of a scenario dreamed up by a college student named Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who sees a fateful date that involves Iris (Brec Bassinger), who gets engaged at an opening night party atop the Skyview Restaurant Tower, complete with a glass elevator and floor.
At the party, Iris suffers a premonition in which a chandelier shard dropping and an ill-timing penny being thrown combine to bring down the entire tower, killing everyone, including her. Stefani only sees the premonition, but finds out later that, in reality, Iris was able to warn everyone in the tower to evacuate and no one died. The problem with that is, Death doesn’t like skipping a meal, and ever since then, those who survived, as well as their descendants who shouldn’t have been born, have been getting knocked off by Death in all the other Final Destination movies.
(It also turns out that Iris is actually Stefani’s grandmother (Gabrielle Ross), who is still alive in the present, living an isolated, risk-free life in the woods, so that Death can never get her, despite his best efforts.)
But before Stefani finds out about her grandmother’s connection, she leaves school and returns home where her brother Charlie (Teo Briones) and their parents live with her aunt, uncle and cousins nearby—in other words: an absolute laundry list of people for Death to knock off. Let the freak accidents begin, involving such obvious and less obvious weapons as a shard of glass, a lawn mower, a garbage truck, an MRI machine, a vending machine, and an entire train. At some point, Stefani is told that if one of Death’s targets dies but is revived, then the curse skips that person and possibly ends it. But who’s going to be brave enough to test out that theory?
The only other living survivor of the tower collapse that never happened shows up at one point, knowing his time is coming soon. And that moment is made all the more bittersweet when that person turns out to be familiar funeral director William Bludworth, played by Tony Todd, who died last year, in one of his last film roles, playing a character who appeared in four of the Final Destination movies.
The directing team of Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein (2018’s Freaks) seem to have a genuine sense of what makes these film work, and also lean hard into the squishy violence and explosions of blood. They also wisely introduce connections to the other films that are smart and clever without stretching the mythology any more than absolutely necessary (there’s a scrapbook involved).
Juana’s Stefani is a great heroine, doing everything she can to save her family, despite some estrangement between her and a few key relatives. The gruesome deaths are loads of fun and ramp up perfectly in terms of tension and scale. Bloodlines is right up there with the best in this series (which most consider to be the second installment) and should only be scene with an audience in a theater, preferably on the biggest screen available (the film was shot in IMAX, so make that your goal). In other words, enjoy this ride with all of your senses engaged at once.
The film is now in theaters.
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