2025 | rated R | starring Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Brec Bassinger, Richard Harmon | directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein | 1 hr 50 mins | 3 1/2 out of 5 stars |
2025 Sequelfest #5
It’s been a decade since the Final Destination franchise went out on a high with the fun Final Destination 5 – an entry that brought the franchise full circle and sewed it up so tight that it killed it off for a decade. In a time when most filmmakers aren’t fans of the franchise they are making, or are downright hostile to it, it’s fun to see a franchise reboot where filmmaker and material are a good match. It’s clear that the directors (here Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein of the indie film Freaks) are fans of the series and actively want to explore new angles to it. The same went for Radio Silence with Scream and Dan Trachtenberg with Predator, but that list is very, very short given the sheer volume of remakes and reboots that come out every year that are cynical at best or attempt to destroy the franchise at worst.
All that to say Final Destination: Bloodlines is not that. It is shockingly good in how well it understands what works about this series, why people like it and maybe some of the pitfalls previous entries fell into. It hits the same formula, but in a different way. It approaches the same Rube Goldberg kills with the right mix of dread and cartoonish comedy, and it attempts to build a lore in a series that was mostly stand-alone entries. All admirable.
All Final movies open with a big explosive accident that our prophetic hero sees ahead of time and prevents, leaving everyone who survived to go on “Death’s List”, which this unseen supernatural puppet master cleans up in absurd ways. Call him God, call him fate, call him Death, the franchise lets you plug in your own philosophy. This time we get a lengthy opening set in a rotating restaurant styled like the Stratosphere or Space Needle. It’s the 1960s and Iris (Brec Bassinger) and her boyfriend Paul (Max Lloyd Jones) are attending the opening night where Paul intends to propose. The vision that Iris has is horrific, as the building starts to collapse, catch on fire and people are dropped to their deaths through glass floors. But it’s not her vision, it’s a dream had by Stefanie (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a college freshman who goes back to her hometown to dissect the dream, find her grandmother Iris and save an entire family line that according to Death’s Design should have never been born.
An epic set-up and despite being one of the longer franchise entries, Bloodlines moves like a live wire, quickly tracing through Stefanie’s growing paranoia, the disbelief of her family members and the increasingly absurd death sequences. The big difference between this and the rest of the franchise is that while the death sequences are similar (finding horror in regular items in broad daylight) they are all executed with a knowing wink and nod. Things fall from the sky and crush people flat, lawn mowers sprint across the yard like they have a mind of their own, a glass floor starts cracking under the weight of people before anything supernatural has even begun. It’s a live action Looney Tunes cartoon with the CGI blood used effectively to keep everything looking as such. Ditching the dark ominous tone of the first few films and putting it all in vivid colorful sunlight, Bloodlines is effectively hilarious in ways that have to be intentional. The one exception being the truly horrific death of the movie’s best character at the end of an MRI machine. Not only is it painful, but it cuts off an interesting attempt to stop the loop the franchise would be better to explore.
We need to talk about the Tony Todd scene. Todd makes another cameo here as “Bludworth”, the mysterious morgue attendant that pops up in all of these movies to explain the rules of God’s Plan, uh, I mean, Death’s Design to the latest group of fated teenagers. We get that scene in this movie too and it is so much better than it’s ever been. Bloodlines has written a clever explanation for who Bloodworth is that retroactively recontextualizes his entire character in the franchise in a way that makes total sense. In a single scene Bloodlines demonstrates why Lipovsky and Stein are right for this job. But we also get the final performance from Candyman himself. Todd, who has been emaciated by cancer in real life at this point and weeks from his own passing, is given free rein to deliver an improvised monologue to the audience about the preciousness of life. Just another example of how Lipovsky and Stein conceived this film as a fan letter to the franchise with Tony Todd as an integral part of that. It’s creative and it’s heartfelt.
Like all of these movies, the characters are pretty thin, just lined up for the slaughter, though Bassinger as the opening protagonist and Harmon as the skeptic lend life to their roles. The big thing that doesn’t evolve here is that Bloodlines still can’t solve the problem the rest of the series has. It is unable to turn this series of deaths into an actual story in which the characters actually work the problem and come up with a solution. With the exception of the solid third act 5 has, none of these movies are able to build the story into a mousetrap that springs a teens vs. death face-off in the 3rd act. Bloodlines is no different despite all of its clever turns. The third act suddenly, is immediately over, and we get the typically mean-spirited final coda. This movie particularly invites such a finale because is presents us with a major character who has cheated death for most of her life. Maybe her offspring could do it this time? Nah.