Fourteen years after last traumatising a generation with everything from logging trucks to tanning beds, horror’s most disaster-prone franchise returns, fully loaded with a fresh vat of nightmare fuel.
Following 2011’s secret prequel, Final Destination: Bloodlines finds new threads to unpick in the franchise’s past and present. This kicks off with the story of a young woman (Brec Bassinger) who suffers a terrible premonition featuring the glitzy sky-high restaurant she’s currently standing in.
You know the drill – Iris manages to avert disaster, but one by one, those she saved start dying horrible deaths. Decades later, and young Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) begins seeing visions of that night and what should have been. The starting point is different, but the (final) destination is the same – Stefani realises that her family are living on borrowed time, and must figure out a way of staying Death’s hand before it comes for them. Awkward family reunion time!
Bloodlines feels like the first Final Destination film that’s seen a Final Destination film, and spends the bulk of its time playing various games of bait-and-switch with an audience who’ve seen all the logging truck memes already. When it’s not re-iterating the rules, that is. After five films, writers Guy Busik and Lori Evans Taylor have their work cut out staying ahead of the curve. Gone are the days when a guy could just get smeared over the front of a truck, or beheaded by a precariously loose chunk of metal without the audience seeing it coming, and the film is forced to seek inventive new ways of offing its characters.
Together with directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, the team are mostly successful, finding a balance between short sharp shocks and the more elaborate Rube Goldberg set pieces. While the more knowing, tongue-in-cheek approach soon grates (one longs for the simplicity of that very first bathtub kill), there’s an edge to the death sequences that the franchise hasn’t seen since 2006. Between a tense family barbeque and a mishap in a tattoo parlour, there’s something to upset almost everyone, and those who come for the more drawn-out disasters won’t be disappointed.
Of the five films that preceded it, Bloodlines shares most of its DNA with series high Final Destination 2, which it continually references with a series of knowing nods and winks. The Easter eggs are cute but largely unnecessary – it stays just as true to its roots with a great soundtrack and respect for the franchise’s lore. It’s only the use of ugly modern CG that holds its opening disaster back from matching that motorway set piece, otherwise it may well have been a contender. It also veers further into black comedy than previous films, making it less effective as a horror film and undermining some of the tension. Gone are the melodramatic ruminations on life, death, and fate (“it’d be a fucked up god to take down this plane”), replaced with a family who carry on quipping even after the violent death of a beloved patriarch.
A shame, as the premise (an entire family tree pruned by Death!) is full of potential. Of that family, Santa Juana is a solid lead, but the dynamic between her and estranged mum Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt) goes largely unexplored, and little brother Charlie (Teo Briones) lacks depth. Elsewhere, the show is stolen by Richard Harmon (The 100) as emo cousin Erik, who scores the film three of its best sequences, and all the most piercing lines, too. Outside of the family, the late Tony Todd reprises his role as mortician William Bludworth in a way that feels entirely natural and serves as a fitting send-off to a horror icon.
Final Destination: Bloodlines isn’t quite a return to form for the long-running franchise – that would imply it has ever been anything less than entertaining. Instead, it’s more of a revitalisation, re-writing Death’s Grand Design for a generation that’s largely wise to His tricks already.
FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES is out in UK cinemas from May 14th 2025.
