Final Destination: Bloodlines is a fun, dopey splatter-fest that balances horror with laughs, and embraces its ridiculousness in such a way that you can’t help but have a good time—that is, if you like your horror bloody and silly.
It all starts in the ’60s when young Iris (Brec Bassinger) attends the opening night of a restaurant atop a high-rise tower. Newly constructed, the tower isn’t quite ready for dance parties, and structural inadequacies lead to a helluva bad time, with lots of people falling, burning, etc.
Or did it? It turns out the opening scene might not have actually happened, and was instead a premonition, transported into the nightmares of present-day Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), granddaughter of Iris.
As in the other Final Destination movies, everybody who died in the premonition, but actually survived, becomes a target of Death, as do their families. Stefani races against time to find her long-lost grandma, learn her secrets and save the lives of her family.
I’ve already told you this is a bloody movie, so things obviously don’t go very well. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein have people dying in many creative ways: impalements, bodies falling, bodies getting smushed, heads getting crushed, heads getting run over by lawn mowers, people getting killed by vending machines, people getting snapped in half, etc., along with people getting crushed by big logs, people getting burned alive and various forms of facial mutilations.
While the film is CGI-heavy, it looks like the producers mixed in a nice balance of practical effects for a sense of realism, keeping the film from looking cheesy and cheap. There’s an event inside a garbage truck which gets an A+. Well done.
The premonition scene in the restaurant is a total blast, an intense display of everything that can go wrong, actually going wrong. When I was a kid, my dad always told me not to drop pennies off of the Empire State Building, because the penny would pick up speed and be like a bullet by the time it hit the ground. While this is not actually true, the folks who wrote this movie definitely got the same speech when they were kids.
As brutal as the film is, it’s also good-natured enough to be surprisingly fun. The characters are all quite likable thanks to a winning cast, so there’s a good bummer element to seeing them being dispatched.
This is unquestionably the best of the Final Destination movies. I wasn’t much of a fan of the franchise’s formula from the start, but Final Destination: Bloodlines makes the wise choice of not taking itself too seriously. It delivers the bloody goods with enough success to qualify it as yet another clear horror film win for 2025. This is a great year for horror.
This is also the last movie Tony Todd, best known as the original Candyman, filmed before his death last year. (He’s in other films still in post-production, but this was the last time he was on set.) He reprises his character of Bludworth in a most ingenious way, and the directors give him a wonderful chance to sort of speak to the fans during his character’s monologue. It’s quite heartwarming—not a feeling I expected to have during a Final Destination movie.
The summer movie season kicks into high gear this week with Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning and Lilo and Stitch. (Stay tuned for my summer movie preview, coming soon.) Bloodlines stands as a surprisingly good and entertaining preamble to the big stuff.