written by Gregory Nussen, Deadline
You know how this is going to go. Someone has a premonition of a ghastly, freakish chain of events that results in mass casualty, a vision of such tactility that it feels realer than real — and then they come to, mere moments before the real thing begins. Yet, after saving several lives, the survivors begin to die anyway, one by one: also in ghastly fashion, also in freakish, Rube Goldberg machine-like sequences. Death doesn’t like it when you cheat.
It’s an ingenious recipe James Wong introduced with co-writers Glen Morgan and Jeffrey Reddick in 2000, and with each subsequent sequel, there hasn’t been a ton of variation on the theme. Just more and more inventive ways to kill off a character. Final Destination: Bloodlines offers everything fans of the franchise have come to expect: a bawdy mix of slapstick humor and gruesome, kinetically charged deaths. But directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein do ask a tantalizing question that no previous entry has: What if the ability to see death coming, and therefore the curse of being hunted by an invisible killer, is genetic?
Writers Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor understand the expectant pleasures of the IP they’re working with and, rather than sink into the quicksand of much of modern horror’s predilection for more psychologically skewed spooks, indulge in just a metric ton of carnage. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t put a refreshing stamp on this now 25-year-old series. Bloodlines begins in 1968 at the opening of a Space Needle-like skyscraper called the Skyview. Iris (Brec Bassinger) is here on a date with Paul Campbell (Max Lloyd-Jones), who is hoping a coveted reservation at the elevated restaurant will provide the perfect setting for a marriage proposal. But just before he does so, Iris is knocked back with a vision of everyone’s future death, a Spielberg-ian run of actions involving a penny stolen from a wishing fountain, an overly flambéed dinner entrée and passionate dancing to ‘Shout’ by the Isley Brothers.
Iris is able to save a lot of lives that day, which leads the film to introduce its first curveball; this was a recurring nightmare for Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) in the present day. Stefani’s night terrors are so intense that all of her college schoolwork is detrimentally impacted to the point of her being possibly placed on academic probation. Under the assumption that the Iris in her dreams is the maternal grandmother she never met, Stefani returns home to find an entire family unit that is both traumatized by the memory of Iris and intent on keeping it all brushed under the rug. But Stefani’s insistence leads to the recognition that, while Iris escaped death that day almost 50 years ago, nearly everybody else did not. Generations of families that were never supposed to exist have been wiped out. And now the Reyes and Campbell families are next. With no one believing in the supernatural, only Stefani and her younger brother Charlie (Teo Briones) have the potential to stop the inevitable.
Between the now elderly Iris (Gabrielle Rose), who lives in a isolated fortress deep in the woods, and her recluse and largely absent mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), Stefani’s life has been ruled by disappointing parental figures. Previous iterations in this series have largely focused on groups of unsuspecting teenagers, becoming along the way a brutal allegory about the specter of death that follows us as we leave the comforts of youth. But Bloodlines’ shifting to a family unit provides space for a surprising amount of pathos, asking questions about the responsibility of a parent and what gets passed — inadvertently or not — from one generation to the next.
But you’re not here for that. You’re here for the unrelenting death and destruction, and Lipovsky and Stein dole it out in generous helpings. Part of the fun here lies in its inherent audience involvement; with every set piece the escalating cutting encourages mental gymnastics in assuming — and inevitably getting tricked — about what ending for each character awaits. Bloodlines includes some of the franchise’s best and nastiest kills. A death involving a garbage truck and another an MRI machine may risk forever re-contextualizing these otherwise innocuous things as death traps in much the same way Final Destination 2 did for chopped wood on the back of a flatbed.
It’s a raucously good time, replete with enough subtle nods to previous entries and cheekily placed music cues for the most loyal of the franchise’s fans. That it also includes some genuinely heartfelt moments, including a nicely written farewell to the series’ lone consistent member William Bludworth (the late, truly great Tony Todd), is a delicious cherry on top of this reliable, horrific recipe dripping in blood and guts.
Featuring Work from Cinematographer Christian Sebaldt, ASC
Featuring Work from Costume Designer Michelle Hunter
