FINAL DESTINATION BLOODLINES Review: Death Is Back, And This Time He Wants Your Whole Damn Family

Resurrecting a franchise after an extended slumber is always a risky move, even more so with a series as beloved by horror fans as Final Destination. It’s been 14 years since the last installment, and in the intervening years cult of fandom around these films has only grown, placing a lot of pressure on directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein to live up to the series’ admirably strong hit ratio.

Thankfully, Final Destination: Bloodlines succeeds on every level a fan could possibly hope for, piling dozens of creatively gruesome deaths on top of a confident metatextual understanding of what the audience wants to see, delivering a killer return to a franchise that should honestly never have been away this long.

Like all of the Final Destination films, Bloodlines opens with a complex, Rube-Goldbergian catastrophic slaughterhouse of death. Twenty-something Iris (Brec Bassinger) is out on a date at a Space Needle like restaurant sometime in the early ‘60s when things start to go sideways. An errant penny begins a cavalcade of destruction that claims dozens of lives and sees the tower come crashing down, with Iris falling to here death, the final victim. Or was it all a dream?

Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) has been experiencing this disaster as a recurring nightmare for months while away at college. She’s in danger of failing out, so in an attempt to get back in control she heads home to her father and brother, hoping that a little grounding will get her back on track.

What she finds instead is that her dreams may be more real than she expected. Iris – played in her present day avatar by Gabrielle Rose – is her estranged grandmother, a crazy woman who has locked herself away from the rest of the family, but she may be the only answer to Stefani’s crisis. Stefani finds her grandmother and discovers that her nightmare was Iris’s premonition. Iris didn’t die back in the ‘50s, but Death has been after her ever since, and it’s getting closer. And with that, away we go…

The Final Destination films have always been about fate and destiny and the ways in which people endeavor to control their own outcomes by outmaneuvering Death’s design. Bloodlines picks up the baton and runs with it, finding gory new ways to dispatch its victims while acknowledging the inherent silliness of it all in a way that is both exciting to watch and endearing to experience.

Bloodlines is not only the goriest of the series – largely computer generated, but we’ll take what we can get – it is also the funniest and most self-aware in a way that doesn’t detract from the thrills at all. The film is gleefully aware of the sandbox it is playing in and it uses every tool and trope at its disposal to draw oohs and aahs from its audience, and it does it all very successfully.

Though the film doesn’t explicitly tie itself to any other entries in the series, it is a part of the same world in which those films took place. The late Tony Todd makes a show-stopping appearance in a single scene to help lay down some of the knowledge gleaned from the victims of the prior films, but that’s the extent of the direct connection. However, that doesn’t stop Bloodlines from extracting laughter and cheers from the franchise’s history by referencing iconic scenes and tropes and laying them in as gags for the new batch of soon-to-be victims.

The Gen Z cast of young actors who find themselves trying to outrun the inevitable come largely from the world of TV, making them unfamiliar to this reviewer, but they all understand the assignment and manage to bring their own flavors to their roles. There is the serious one – Stefani – and her innocent little brother, the bitchy blonde, the handsome himbo, and the rebellious tattooist among the young part of the cast.

Holding down the parental side of things is Stefani’s mother, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt) who ran away from her kids when she realized she was in danger of ruining their lives by following in her mother, Iris’s hermetic footsteps. They all acquit themselves admirably, and while I’d be lying if I said I could point them out in a lineup a day later, they serve their purpose on camera quite well.

Most of the fun in the Final Destination series is watching Death’s long wind ups to the eventual gruesome deaths, and the kills in Bloodlines are top notch. They are creative, humorous, explosively violent, and even when the deaths themselves are silly, the loss of each character is given a moment to sink and allow the audience to experience the pain with the family.

A successful slasher doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel, but it does need to show the audience that it knows how to drive, and Final Destination: Bloodlines puts its foot on the gas from minute one and doesn’t let up until you’ve laughed, cried, cheered, and cringed yourself silly. It’s well written, well performed, and expertly designed and any fan of the franchise will find a lot to love.