Kimber Myers
I have never heard a movie audience cheer so loudly at the death of a child onscreen as I did in Final Destination Bloodlines. Yet such celebrations aren’t unusual for the Final Destination franchise, known as much for its creative kills as for establishing most of its doomed characters as real pieces of shit before they bite it. In this cruel cinematic universe, you’re not supposed to feel sadness or empathy when an asshole credited simply as “Racist” dies. There’s no mourning in this world, only screams and laughs, and then it’s on to the next one.
By nature, horror movie franchises are built on formulas, deviating just enough to keep fans returning for entry after entry. But few series so rigorously follow their own conventions as Final Destination, which churned out reliably entertaining movies without much invention outside of the ever more innovative deaths — until Bloodlines, that is. The sixth movie in the series mixes up the formula just enough to feel like it’s doing something new, while still giving audiences what they like: plenty of imaginative deaths and new fears to worry about on their way home from the theater.
Bloodlines briefly touches on the equations built into its premise thanks to our heroine, Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a stressed-out college student who the movie kinda hints might be a math major or something. This series is not big on details outside of its Rube Goldberg-esque killing machines; any more explanation might have made this one (already the series’ longest) even lengthier. However, Bloodlines’ biggest departure might be that it’s actually a genuinely good movie and not just a fun one. (My apologies to the rest of the series, except for The Final Destination, which can rot in hell alongside all of its characters).
Formerly an A student, Stefani has been struggling after months of having the same distressing dream. Night after night, she sees her grandmother Iris as a young woman (Brec Bassinger) in 1969, and she dies with countless others in a disaster that destroys a restaurant that was perched 500 feet at the top of a tower. When she meets her grandmother in the present (Gabrielle Rose), she learns that she had a premonition about their deaths, and her warning helped save everyone from dying. But, as we’ve heard countless times before (okay, five times), death has a design and doesn’t like being denied. Over the decades, it hasn’t only killed off each of the survivors from the restaurant, but also their descendants, who were never meant to be alive in the first place.
Instead of the series’ usual pattern of a group of friends and acquaintances trying to survive, Bloodlines — true to its title — focuses on Iris’s children and grandchildren when it is finally their time to die. With a family as its focus, this entry has a bit more emotional heft and thematic weight than its predecessors … but not quite so much that seeing them die in crazy ways isn’t still a lot of fun.
And on top of being fun, Bloodlines is really funny. The script by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor has jokes that actually land (which is more than I can say for most of the people in these movies). It doesn’t just wring laughs out of how enjoyably stupid it is, as its predecessors have done. There is still some stupidity present, predictably in how some characters behave, but Bloodlines itself isn’t dumb, and it doesn’t treat the audience like it is either. There’s clear affection for this franchise and for the fans, and not just in the brief appearance from the late horror legend Tony Todd, who appeared in all of the previous films except the worst one and earned applause from the audience. Bloodlines is the series at its most self-aware, but it avoids the smugness of other recent reboots like Scream VI (which, weirdly, Busick also co-wrote).
This is also the series at its best — or at least tying with Final Destination 3. Santa Juana isn’t on level with the third film’s lead, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, in terms of charm, but she’s great at communicating concern and terror. Yet the film understood the assignment, delivering gruesome, imaginative kills that are among some of the series’ best (or worst, depending on your perspective). They’re admirably gross, and you can just see writers Busick and Evans Taylor and directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein rubbing their hands with glee over how people will react to their sick creation. And react they did: people audibly groaned and laughed and shrieked with glee. It’s been over a decade since the last movie and a quarter century since the first one, but the Bloodlines filmmakers have found a way to reinvent the Final Destination wheel — and then promptly crush someone’s head with it.
B+
“Final Destination: Bloodlines” is in theaters this weekend.
