May 21st, 2025

The thing about a good horror franchise is that it always has a central figure, usually the killer, or as Buffy might put it, “The Big Bad.” Jason, Damien, Freddy, Michael Myers, these are the stars of the show, that way you don’t need to keep most of your cast and you can keep building the lore centering on these other worldly fiends. So it came as a bit of a surprise that the main character in the long running Final Destination franchise was the concept of Death himself.

You never see Death on screen, he just makes things happen with a variety of Rube Goldberg inspired death machines that inevitably end up with someone suffering a freak accident. They have cheated him because someone had a vision of a terrible disaster, and he plans to get everyone involved to pay up. Death is after all, one of the few universal things that tie us all together, so while he’s not as quippy as Chucky or as foreboding as a Frankenstein we can all relate because even if the characters do manage to cheat their way to the end credits, we know he’ll get his due one way or the other.

There have been six Final Destination movies at this point, it’s to the point that the deaths could fill a truckload of Mousetrap games with each board having it’s own zany obstacle course of gruesome gore machines. So Final Destination Bloodlines changes it up in a few smart ways. For starters, Death is after not only the people that escaped him this time, but also their children, as those that dodged the proverbial bullet have been on the run for a good long time.

The familial trauma angle of death, and the trauma our families can bring to it is a lens that The Monkey smartly used this year. Both movies have similar messaging, about how the scars left by relatives, mentally, psychologically, and in our genetic code are hard if not impossible to overcome. Through no fault of our own, the challenges we face can hurt us and even kill us because of the choices of those who came before. It felt natural for that level of thought to come from a Stephen King novel, but it’s exciting and refreshing to see this take from a fun, gross, and silly horror film. The bleed over of arthouse horror into blood curdling genre film is a welcome one. Much like The First Omen, Final Destination Bloodlines wants to both have it’s fun, and say something as it does.

Among the heroes of Final Destination Bloodlines is a brief cameo from the late Tony Todd, who passed late last year. He gives a wonderful performance, worthy of any award show as a farewell, lending gravitas to the film in a way one might not have been able to guess. The Final Destination franchise has never been one of emotional weight, and yet Todd, and others, are able to give it depth when it needs it, and lighten it up surrounding some of the wackier kills, a genuinely remarkable feat.

As an example of both new age and legacy sequel, Final Destination Bloodlines is the best example of both. Not trying too hard to tie back to films much of the audience probably hasn’t seen, and improving on the bedrock of clever twisted ideas. We can only hope that Zach Cregger keeps the streak alive whenever his Resident Evil comes out.

3.5/5