Final Destination: Bloodlines review: Deaths got a giddy new design

It’s been 25 years since we first watched Death wind its wicked design around the throats of the young and old with nasty efficiency in the first Final Destination film. Built upon a series of ruthless Rube-Goldbergian traps that methodically ensnared the survivors of a plane crash after they eluded their fate thanks to the prophetic vision of one Cassandra-like figure among them, its mix of goofiness and gore was immediately embraced. Five hit films in 11 brief years, from 2000 to 2011, ensued. Each entry in the massively successful franchise somehow upped the ante with more outrageous and elaborate spectacles — the Aughts belonged to Death, baby! 

Now, after a 14-year break, the dark spectre has returned with Final Destination: Bloodlines, a riotous zap-in-the-pants of “Looney Tunes by Tom Savini” entertainment that needs to be enjoyed with as large a crowd of like-minded cinematic sadists as you can scrounge up. If watching all of the ways the human body can get exploded is your cuppa, then have I got the hehe-sicko movie for you. You’ll cringe, hoot, and holler. You’ll wipe the phantom viscera off your face. And you’ll spend the entire ride home convinced everything’s out to kill you. It’s horror movie nirvana. 

The writers (Jon Watts, Guy Busick, and Lori Evans Taylor) and directors (Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein) went out of their way to find some creative ways to upend the formula, now on its sixth spin through the multiplex. You will get some genuine sideways revelations served up alongside your innards-soaked slapstick. No worries, though – this film delivers heavily, sloppily, on exactly what we keep coming back for. (Guts. We’ve come for guts.)

Since it’s been 14 years, here’s a quick Final Destination catch-up.

Credit: Eric Milner / Warner Bros. Pictures

Writer Jeffrey Reddick, who came up with the concept in the late ‘90s as the plot for an episode of The X-Files, quickly realized it demanded the feature-presentation treatment. The Final Destination franchise is exquisite in its simplicity – why bother with the lumbering backstory of another nerd wronged by his classmates who returns looking for revenge while wearing a big bunny mask when we’ve had the ultimate boogeyman skulking in the shadows all along? Fearing the chaotic abstraction of the Grim Reaper is so cave-wall ancient, it’s scorched into our genetics. 

The lynchpin innovation from Reddick was that we weren’t dealing with the black-hooded Death figure we typically imagine thanks to Peter Paul Rubens, Ingmar Bergman, and the Bill & Ted movies. Instead, we have an invisible but deeply malevolent presence that gently coaxes shampoo bottles and coffee mugs into position as Mouse-Trap-esque weapons of mass destruction. The Final Destination movies did what M. Night Shyamalan failed to do with The Happening — they make a light breeze spooky. Wind is the real villain here! Always knocking things over, the dominos of our horrific demise. 

The fun in these films has been in watching the clever ways the screenwriters manage to turn everyday ordinary objects — ceiling fans, hairspray, pigeons — into diabolical murder traps. These movies are Saw sans Jigsaw, just the giddy force of Fate doing a jig and pissing on our graves. 

Make no mistake. For good or evil, these films (excuse the pun) live or die by their death scenes. (Some people take umbrage with this admittedly unhinged form of nihilism, and those people should probably just stay home with their Downton Abbey.) What Psycho did for showers and Jaws did for a peaceful swim at the beach the Final Destination movies have done for logging trucks and tanning beds, for gymnastics and pool drains and the friendly neighborhood bus. An encyclopedia of How Not to Die’s could be sourced entirely from the screenplays.

Nowhere does the franchise routinely go bigger than it does with each chapter’s epic opening set piece. From the plane crash in the original movie to the (still unmatched) highway pile-up in the second, on to rollercoasters and bridge collapses and careening race cars, oh my. These introductory disasters introduce us to all of our characters (aka the victims-to-be) while setting the stage, the table, and the mood for all of the mortal mayhem to come. 

And Final Destination: Bloodlines has the franchise’s biggest and boldest opener to date. 

Please place your acrophobia with your things at the door.

Credit: Eric Milner / Warner Bros. Pictures

While the series has mucked about with time jumps before (hello, Part 5), it still comes as a shock a minute into Final Destination: Bloodlines when we find ourselves in the company of a bubblegum bobby-soxer type named Iris (Brec Bassinger) who’s hitting the town with her slick-haired beau Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones) in the year that was 1969. And it’s not just any ordinary day-of-the-week Italian dinner that Iris and Paul have their sights set upon — it’s the opening night for a Space-Needle-looking tower called The SkyView that’s hoisted a circular restaurant way up to its top among the clouds. Nothing ominous to see there, wink wink. (Less wink wink than it is a hammer to the head, but I digress.)

Sure enough, Iris soon starts taking note of unfriendly omens. The overloaded elevator. The bratty kid stealing coins from the wishing fountain. An ominous (you guessed it) breeze. (Suck it, M. Night!) What starts off as a teen dream between squeaky clean young lovers quickly starts sinking Iris’ stomach with nerves… and then with extreme structural damage. (Seriously, though — why would anyone do The Twist on a glass floor suspended hundreds of feet in the air? It’s like you’ve never watched a Final Destination movie, people of 1969.) 

But before Iris can even scream “teenage pregnancy” to her date, it’s not just a baby she has bouncing around in her belly. It’s the metal beams and cracking cement and walls of searing singing flames suddenly swirling all around her.

Yes, Iris is pregnant. And Iris’ pregnancy is indeed important, because the filmmakers weren’t just subtitling this movie “Bloodlines” as an homage to the terrible Pet Sematary movie from a couple of years back. The Final Destination mythology has always touched upon the idea of babies as being important — their births disrupting the count that Death is such a damn stickler about. 

And so Iris, in having her premonition of the SkyView’s collapse and then rescuing a shit-ton of people by warning them away from it, sets in motion something that echoes through the decades like the infamous butterfly flapping its wings in Peking. (Thank you, Dr. Ian Malcom.) Iris’ baby was never meant to be born — much less grow to adulthood and branch out an entire family tree that reaches to the present day! 

Bifurcated down the middle like, well, Seann William Scott’s skull in the first movie, this story extends its bony fingertip toward the future (which is to say the present) where it introduces us to Iris’ granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana). Flunking out of college, Stefani is besieged by a recurring nightmare involving a collapsing building and the perky blonde girl who dies horrifically amongst its rubble. 

From there, Final Destination: Bloodlines becomes a tale of passed-on familial trauma and fears — unto each generation is born a new set of neuroses. And the offspring of Iris and Paul find themselves particularly accursed on that front. 

Call it Back to the Future directed by Eli Roth.

Don’t go worrying that this will be more of the “Laurie Strode wallowing in 12-step chicanery” type of horror that’s gotten played out over the last decade or so. Final Destination: Bloodlines only takes its traumas as far as it can throw them. And oh, it loves to throw things! Most especially if they contain shards of glass, metal chains, peanut butter cups, the recycling, and a Prince Albert piercing. Perhaps not in that order. Anyway, it’s clear that everybody involved spent the 14 years since the last movie thinking up twisty sick-headed scenarios involving wildly unexpected objects of doom — there are new weapons hiding around every corner. Not since Sideshow Bob has a rake in the yard taken on such fiendish significance.

As fate sneaks toward Stefani and her cursed family, including her sweet younger brother Charlie (Teo Briones), her estranged mom (Rya Kihlstedt), and her myriad aunts, uncles, and varying-degrees-of-annoying cousins, it becomes a battle against time. (And vending machines.) Can Stefani connect the dots to understand the riddle of her doomed heritage and save those she loves? Or will a lawn mower sit on their faces one by inexorable one? 

As you can probably tell, Final Destination: Bloodlines isn’t taking any of this bloodbath seriously. It knows the score: We’re here to grapple with our own mortality in the goofiest way imaginable. Hamlet’s wish to see his too-solid flesh melt meets a cartoon mallet here, with everybody on Death’s List one misstep away from being a big splat of intestines. That deep unseriousness toward life’s most pressing topic is this franchise’s greatest feast. And we feed well once more.

RIP Tony Todd, Candyman and forever horror icon.

Credit: Eric Milner / Warner Bros. Pictures

There is one notable exception to Final Destination: Bloodlines’ deep and delicious unseriousness though, and it makes for a shockingly moving one. Tony Todd, the actor best known for playing Candyman, has been the only stalwart presence in the survivor-less Final Destination franchise since the first outing in 2000. Five times he’s previously played the coroner William Bludworth, always on the scene first to scoop up those intestines and then to warn the doomed of their imminent doom. 

Thankfully Todd managed to shoot his role one last time for Final Destination: Bloodlines before he passed away in November of 2024. Looking frail but with not a whit of that immediately recognizable bass of his weakened, Todd seizes straight onto the series’ formidable undercurrent. Delivering a scene for the ages, he tells us (still with that playful twinkle in his eye that we’ve come to know and love so well) how every second of life is precious. And that we shouldn’t let even the obscene absurdity that is Death rob us of those moments. Not even if it wants to stick a great big rebar through our eye socket, dammit. And ain’t that the real meat of it, in the end?

Final Destination: Bloodlines premieres May 16.