“Final Destination: Bloodlines” is pure, uncut, bloody entertainment. In a sleek and sexy hour and fifty-minute runtime, Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein somehow found a way to take a nearly thirty-year-old slasher franchise, where Death itself is the invisible stalking killer, and pump fresh adrenaline alongside a fair amount of heart into its veins. By taking a fresh approach to the traditional “person sees premonition of their demise and avoids it, thereby goading Death into a life-size game of blood and guts Rube Goldberg monstrosity” formula and casting the curse down a generational line, “Final Destination: Bloodlines” is able to do what most of these films fail, or never even attempt, to accomplish: actually making us care about the subjects of the film’s slicing and dicing.
The “Final Destination” films are always a hoot. The previous four installments are known for their wildly inventive “real world” death scenarios, with everything from tanning beds, roller coasters, and, perhaps most famously, a logging truck on the highway, utilized to maim and massacre the “lucky” souls who somehow avoided some cataclysmic disaster meant to kill them. The first film featured an airplane explosion that several high school students avoided via a classmate’s premonition. In “Final Destination: Bloodlines”, the comparable sequence comes in the form of a rollicking, stand-up-and-cheer showstopper at the film’s opening, where a young woman named Iris (Brec Bassinger) is brought to a new “Space Needle” style restaurant called “Skyview” by her boyfriend. What he doesn’t know is that she is actually pregnant, what she doesn’t know is that this four-hundred-foot-tall, overly crowded, shoddily constructed testament to man’s hubris will soon turn the drinking and dancing crowd into bloody smears on the asphalt or charred briquettes in the sky. “Final Destination” films are known for their cause-and-effect death sequences, a “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, Somehow You’ll Get Disemboweled” type scenario if you will. The Skyview sequence would tick all the boxes of a grand time at the movies on its own, fully investing the audience in Iris’s mounting terror and panic as Directors Lipovsky and Stein slowly set their chess pieces in place for the final, cacophonous destruction. The filmmaking is thrilling and confident, the gore is punishing and hilarious, and the first thirty minutes of the film are well worth the price of admission on their own.
Cut to nearly 50 years later, where college student Stefani (a wonderfully endearing Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is soon to lose her scholarship because she keeps having horrific nightmares of the Skyview disaster and the death of her Grandmother Iris. There are a couple of issues here, however: the Skyview never collapsed, and Grandmother Iris is not dead but is excommunicated from the family after a lifetime of death-obsessed mania. Stefani, without any other option, tracks down her grandmother to a secluded, highly guarded cabin where Iris (now played by Gabrielle Rose) has lived for the past thirty years, ever on the lookout for Death to come calling. Iris explains that the dream that has haunted Stefani is not what really happened, but a premonition Iris received while atop the Skyview long ago. In reality, Iris saved everyone in the building from certain, fantastical death, but Death did not enjoy being outmatched. So, over the past fifty years, Death has slowly made its way through the people who were at the Skyview, slaughtering them and the offspring they were not meant to bear in increasingly Mouse Trap-ian fashion. Now, Iris is next, and by extension, her children and grandchildren; a legacy of death sprung from a good deed gone sour and left to rot the blameless children generations beyond, whose crime was simply being born at all.
“Final Destination: Bloodline” touches thematically on the acidic generational aftertaste of parents and grandparents kicking the deadly can of their choices down the timeline for their children to muddle through and solve. There IS a metaphor a work here that the film merely hints at, whereas the similar yet slightly superior “The Monkey” from earlier this year lays these ideas bare and raw. “Everybody dies, and that’s life”, Tatiana Maslani says in Ozgood Perkins’ latest; a perfect tag line for “Bloodlines” if it hadn’t been used merely two months before. But, credit to the film for trying to tackle something a little more precient, forging the path of Death’s bloody revenge trail smack through the middle of an innocent family certainly ups the emotional stakes and makes each death feel meaningful, if not worth mourning over. That little extra effort to make us care certainly adds to the film’s gumbo, but, if we’re being honest here, that’s not why you’re laying down your eighteen bucks. We’re here for the kills, and “Bloodlines” is more than up to the task, crafting gory, cringe-inducing, squirm in your seat or stand up and cheer level mutilations that had this reviewer cackling for most of the runtime. While no ONE death is as iconic as some of the highs of the series past, their execution, pun intended, is at the highest level the series has reached thus far and provides the jet fuel the story needs to rip and slash it’s way through victim after victim all the way to the movie’s final, bloody frame. The packed theater I watched with left the theater beaming, and so did I.
A quick note about the most famous cast member in “Final Destination: Bloodlines”, and in fact, the most famous cast member of the entire series, Mr. Tony Todd. With a voice you’d know from video games (“Spider-Man 2”) and commanding on screen presence you’d know from a career of fantastic film performances (“Candyman”, “The Rock”, the New Orleans set “Hatchet” films), Tony Todd was a legend of the highest caliber and the only recurring character throughout the “Final Destination” films as William Bludworth, a creepy coroner and distiller of ancient truths about the relentless nature of Death to reclaim what is rightfully it’s. Todd, who passed in November 2024 from stomach cancer, returns for his final on-screen role in “Bloodlines”, offering sage counsel to Stefani and her family as they attempt to cheat Death’s clutches. Todd’s scene, a touching elegy to a man who brought so much joy and nightmares to moviegoers for generations, is perhaps what best sets “Bloodlines” apart from its predecessors, not in bloody excess but in acceptance. Much like my beloved “The Monkey”, death comes for us all in its own time. Fearing it is fruitless, as that fear simply stains the time we have left, time that is precious and should be cherished for the gift that it is. As Todd steps from his scene and into history, it is this sentiment with which he leaves us all, through heartfelt words that he himself wrote and performed with a love that is palpable and pure. How’s that for a movie where somebody gets a lawn mower to the face? C’est la vie.
“Final Destination: Bloodlines” is a crackerjack picture, if you don’t mind the prize being gastro-intestinal in nature. See it with a packed crowd and give Mr. Todd the send-off he deserves.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Final Destination: Bloodlines” is playing at Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
