Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
Recent Final Destination rip-off The Monkey did very little for me. Random people meeting creatively horrible ends is life on steroids, but there’s a reason people watch Final Destination- tension and gore. The Monkey had no tension and the gore got increasingly less amusing.
Life is flimsy and vulnerable and a decent set up and fun approach to the inevitable destruction by death’s rage is something I was surprised the studios took a break from. I’m glad it’s back, and Final Destination: Bloodlines I was desperate to see at the cinema.
Decades after her Grandmother avoided a catastrophe (played out brilliantly as the opening set piece) Stefani’s wild nightmares become reality. It’s down to her to keep her family safe from what literally awaits them everywhere. Bloodlines is a reverse slasher, they’re knowingly running both towards and away from death. It’s a twisty-twist back on being same-same but different. It works.
Bloodlines has the best IMdB rating of all of the now six films. I’ve apparently rated them all 7/10, which means I’d lose money betting on them, I think. I don’t understand gambling and if you think you do, that’s when they’ve got you. It’s OK to be an idiot there. Don’t gamble, kids, just drink and smoke and know why you’re sick and broke. Nobody ever got gambler’s cancer, just a lack of wife and kids. Much like death, the house always wins.
He’s not the first actor to do it (Sid Haig springs to mind) but it is pretty rare. RIP Tony Todd, and thank you for Candyman.
It’s now available on Amazon Prime, but I went to the cinema with my friend and his teenager. They’re a pretty hardy kid, and had seen the first Final Destination film in advance of our trip. Bloodlines is far more brutal than expected, in a good way, for me, but for possibly the first time in my life as a childless person, not for someone else who I gave a shit about.
The tension in its expectation of disaster is superb. The deaths are eye watering, gory, fun and humorous. Humorous if you’re a grown up who has spent twenty five plus years becoming inured to violence on screen and just how awfully boring the rest of your adult existence is. Perhaps that’s where the horror for my friend’s teenager was, they can’t see how a skyscraper death might be an interesting way to bow out.
My ninety five year old aunt went to Dignitas*. She had a sense of humour, I bet she’d have chosen to be a kamikaze stunt person for her exit were it on offer. The young, they don’t appreciate how funny dying can be.
The makers knew they had to level up the ick factor, make the gore more extreme and deaths more horrific. Congratulations, Zach Lipovski and Adam B. Stein, you did it. I definitely applaud that achievement, but, I did wonder how Bloodlines is a 15. My friend suggested that it is because there’s no nudity or drugs on display. He’s probably right, and that is terrifying.
A nipple or a spliff might be what traumatises the kids more than head crushing, limb severing, existential exits? It is OK to remind people that they’re going to die, and show them how horrible a permanent hiatus from inhale/exhale might be, but good Lord don’t let them think there might be some sexy time or lovely drugs between now and the sword of Damocles.
Anyway, we all enjoyed it.
Final Destination: Bloodlines is nothing but fun, though does deflate in spectacle down the stretch. It would be hard to keep its excellent opening act going, though, and it is a welcome return for a series which should keep going. 8/10, the best in the series.
*No really. Bless her.
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