It’s been 14 years since the last Final Destination movie, but Final Destination: Bloodlines fits right in with this series’s slick early-2000s aesthetic and gloriously ludicrous sensibility. Which was probably to be expected, given that making a new entry in this franchise doesn’t require jumping through too many illogical hoops or reinventing an outdated conceit. Death is the ultimate horror villain; it can’t be killed or identified or (as these movies prove over and over again) defeated. Unlike other horror reboots, Bloodlines (which is the sixth entry in the series) doesn’t need to come up with silly reasons for why some dead masked butcher or previously condemned demon has come back. That’s what makes these movies special. Death has never gone away. He’s waiting for you and me as we speak. And he ends almost all these pictures victorious.
If we judge these films primarily by the creativity and elaborate absurdity of their death scenes, this latest entry ably expands the palette without messing with the formula. The structural novelty of a Final Destination installment is that the first kill is always the most spectacular. Previously, we’ve had a catastrophic racetrack conflagration, a gnarly roller-coaster accident, a horrific plane crash, a massive bridge collapse, and, of course, the greatest highway pile-up in cinematic history. This time, we have the queasy destruction of a tony restaurant called the Skyview, high atop a Space Needle–style observation tower. The time is the late 1960s, and a young woman named Iris (Brec Bassinger) is about to be proposed to by her boyfriend. But she’s surrounded by ominous signs. Are they genuine omens, or just her ’60s square anxiety? A fancy elevator doesn’t seem particularly stable; table chefs blithely flambé dishes; Iris stabs her finger on a rose thorn; a piece breaks off an unsteady crystal chandelier; a loud band inspires a crowded glass dance floor to stomp in unison to their cover of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout”; some snot-nosed kid throws pennies off the 499-foot tower. All these elements will play their ingenious parts in the inevitable phantasmagoria of carnage to follow.
In true Final Destination tradition, though, this first kill is also often imaginary. We experience it as a nightmare that the film’s heroine, college student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), has been plagued by. Looking into why she keeps seeing this horrific dream vision, Stefani discovers that Iris was her long-lost grandmother, and that she prevented this disaster back in the day thanks to her premonitions. Over the years, however, Death did come for the many people Iris saved, all in the order in which they were originally meant to die — along with their families, who in many cases weren’t supposed to have existed. Now, Stefani realizes that her own family members — including her surly teen brother, Charlie (Teo Briones), and her cousins Erik (Richard Harmon), Julia (Anna Lore), and Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) — are next in line.
That’s as good a setup as any, and directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein (working from a script by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor) come up with intriguing new settings, devices, and premises for the film’s traditionally Rube Goldbergian slaughter: a tattoo-and-piercing parlor, an MRI machine, a peanut allergy, and (that old Final Destination standby) the family cookout gone horribly wrong. Most horror flicks entrap their characters in one location or put them in some sort of unique, tense situation (think: satanic possession, or pissing off the wrong truck driver, attracting the wrong person, etc.), but in Final Destination, Death works with the great mundane canvas of ordinary life. In these movies, if you just go about your day — driving on the highway, using a vending machine, fixing a drink, doing gymnastics — then, congratulations, you’re the ideal victim.
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There’s a nostalgic thrill to watching Bloodlines revive the familiar rhythms of a Final Destination kill. Everyday objects achieve graceful menace as the film lines them up to play their parts in Death’s dance of destiny: a glass shard lands in a pile of crushed ice and instantly becomes near-invisible; a beer bottle perches precariously at the edge of a table; the fabric on a trampoline slowly starts tearing while a humble rake waits patiently beneath; a spigot is accidentally turned on and a coiled garden hose stirs to life, newly thick with water. How exactly will all these elements conspire to gore one of our heroes? That’s where the anticipation and the surprise come in. The mayhem varies tonally, too: One hugely elaborate scene leads (shockingly) to the intended victim casually walking away. The big climax is weak sauce, alas, but those are always a challenge, since so much energy is spent wowing us with earlier kills.
As expected, there are hints at franchise lore here and there. A couple of close calls evoke iconic sequences, including one gruesome closing nod to the series’s highpoint, Final Destination 2. More touchingly, a visibly ill Tony Todd (who died last year) returns as creepy mortician William Bloodworth, whose typically gnomic and ominous ruminations about Death’s design are here mixed in with improvised words from the actor’s own heart about appreciating the time we’re given and living life to the fullest — a welcome fourth-wall break that should move any longtime fan of these movies. Newcomers, on the other hand, might wonder where all that sudden sincerity came from.
Aside from Stefani herself, the people in Bloodlines don’t do a lot besides get killed in stupid and unlikely ways. This is perhaps to be expected. But at their best, Final Destination films bring together a variety of characters from different walks of life to argue, fight, scheme, collaborate, and die. That’s because the universality of this series’s vision speaks to both the catastrophizer and the cavalier, which is what ultimately makes the films so cathartic.
Bloodlines is a welcome revival of a great movie series that was often smarter than other scare-fests, but one does wish that this new entry had more actual character development, more back-and-forth. The recent craze for rebooting every horror franchise on Earth has led to a lot of paper-thin human grist for the blood-soaked genre mill — that is perhaps the end result of redefining nearly all horror as variations on “slasher” — yet these types of films work best when they allow us to feel at least a little bit for their characters. That’s not necessarily an argument for cheap sentiment. Both earnest viewers and splatter-drunk genre fiends can get excited by the deaths of characters who’ve been given some shading. The more involved we are with the people onscreen, the more invested we’ll be in what happens to them. Because, ultimately, they’re all just stand-ins for ourselves. Bloodlines gives us plenty of what we want from a new Final Destination movie, but it also could have given us quite a bit more.
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