Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

Rated R for horrific deaths, leaning a little harder into Saw style deaths than the previous entries.  Still, while gory, it isn't outside the scope of the previous films.  If anything, the upsetting part is the contemporary filming styles that somehow make these moments seem a little more troubling.  There isn't any sex or nudity, which is a breath of fresh air because, as silly as the movie gets, it doesn't feel superfluous.  Still, the movie is upsetting and gory as heck.  

DIRECTORS: Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein

Yeah!  I cheated!  I jumped the line to watch Final Destination: Bloodlines an hour earlier than I thought.  If the Final Destination movies are all about Death's Design, I'm all about the algorithm.   But I wanted, for once, to be done talking about horror movies once November showed up.  Also, like, I have a nice break from writing after this.  Taking all that into consideration, my viewership just jumped up in the middle of the night.  It could entirely be bots.  Who knows?  Considering that Cujo didn't get a lot of Threads attention, that makes the most amount of sense.  Still, I can't deny how good it feels to see that number spike up again.  I'm easily manipulated.

Before we go into the specifics of Final Destination: Bloodlines, I want to talk about the franchise as a whole.  I have always kind of shied away from these movies when it came to the blog.  On paper, I'm against gore.  I'm pro-character.  I'm pro-plot.  From any breakdown of these movies, I should absolutely hate this series.  As I've stated in all of my other entries, I realized that these movies are excuses for VFX artists to strut their stuff and story be darned.  I accepted that pretty darned quickly.  And when I accepted that, I had a really good time.  I would never advocate for stupid movies.  Okay, almost never, because he I am, talking about how sometimes a stupid movie franchise is exactly what is needed.  

The funny thing is, Final Destination, as a franchise, might be the most existential concept in the world.  It is a movie that personifies mortality.  It is a constant commentary on how anyone one of us, at any moment, are a loose screw away from being turned into a bag of red goo.  I mean, we're meant to laugh and scream at these moments.  There should be something profound to be said about how life is fleeting and that no one is immortal.  Instead, from moment one of this series, the narrative is something far sillier than anything I just wrote.  Instead of actually treating Death as something majestic, it's treated as a bit of a petulant child who doesn't like to be stymied.  

This kind of brings me to Bloodlines.  Bloodlines finally did the thing that I wanted the series to do: Death by Natural Causes.  I was always wondering why --in a completely practical society --that people didn't just...die.  I mean, if Death is really hurt by people surviving the grand design, why go through all the showmanship that these movies thrive on?  Why have the most gory disaster ever to pulp people by acts of God?  People die natural deaths all the time.  They die for no reason.  Do you know why Death is a crybaby about losing?  Because dying of cancer is all just a little bit sad.  By the way, I was actually heartbroken by seeing Tony Todd appearing in his last on screen film only to have him, in character, dying of cancer.  That's a bit rough.  It seems a little tactless on the part of the filmmakers.  But in my head, Tony Todd probably appreciated being welcomed back to the franchise.  Even moreso, he was able to put a cap and closure on his character, which is nice in a really screwed up way.  

Anyway, I have to say that, while I enjoyed Bloodlines more than many other entries in the franchise, I was a bit let down.  I'm going to complain for a while before I start talking about the things I liked.  It's what I always do.  (But what I also do is forget what I like and then, in a desperate attempt to close up yet another blog entry, just cap it off without the counterpoint.  I, at least, recognize some of my own inadequacies!)  I just spent the last two paragraphs talking about Death's personality, at least based on the Rube Goldberg events that happen in these movies.  The Death of Bloodlines might be the most confusing version of Death yet.  The opening sequence of the film, which is probably the most impressive opening death sequence, takes place in the '50s or '60s.  We have a World's Fair style exhibit of a Space Needle inspired Sky View Tower.  Now, we are all waiting for this thing to start crashing to the ground.  Because the filmmakers wanted to have this grandiose spectacle ever, don't allow the collapse of this tower to be in line with natural disasters.  A million things go wrong to make this tower collapse.  But the problem is that it doesn't really feel like Death's personality is coming through.   Maybe this is a bit of headcanon when it comes to this series, but I see the reason that Death is so spiteful in these films is that he sets these events in motion long before the actual bullet is fired.  These are stories of entropy and timing.  In the case of Bloodlines, Death puts the penny in the fountain in viewing of the child, who throws it off the roof, forcing it into the ventilation system.  Everything that happens poorly in the story should come from the ventilation system.  Instead, we have three separate wild coincidences (can't spell "coincidence" without "coin") that makes this seem absurd.  There's no reason for the split.  It could have just played out stemming from the coin.  The coin stops the fan.  The fan breaks, exposing the building to flammable gas.  The flambee blows up the main room, exploding the floor.  The explosion, combined with the people shifting in the building, tips the tower, causing the whole thing to collapse.  See?  Natural disaster.  Having the coin, the unscrewing of the pins, and the cracked glass floor is just silly.  

Also, Iris's den makes not a lick of sense.  What Bloodlines is doing is evoking Halloween Ends.  At least that trilogy.  And Halloween Ends is evoking Terminator 2: Judgment Day.  There's this cool concept that we have this battle weary woman, the one who has beat the odds so many times that she will not allow the evil to come to her without a fortress between the monster and her.  And, for Halloween and Terminator, that totally makes sense.  It's actually absurd that Sydney Prescott is about to fight Ghostface again and doesn't have a bunker.  But Iris's bunker makes no sense.  It's meant to look cool, not be effective.  The fact that it just exploded when other people tried using it kind of says that Iris would have died minutes into living there.  The only real safe place, in my head, is what Ali Larter's character (you know, the one with the absurd name?) does in Final Destination 2.  A padded cell is the only thing that even makes a lick of sense.  

Finally, as much as I like this scene, I want to talk about Erik and the tattoo parlor.  I mean, I love the sequence.  It's really gruesome and ornate.  But also, a fakeout?  I love a good fakeout.  I really do.  I like the idea that we were so invested in something happening, only to have that fade to something else.  But that sequence is in line with the personality that Death has in this movie.  It's so elaborate.  It also has the absurdity that Final Destination is known for.  The odds for those things to happen in succession is something that you only really see in these movies.  Like, the chain in the ceiling hits Erik's piercing perfectly and it raises him to the ceiling?  Yeah, I'm glad that he survived.  I don't know how he survived, but I'm glad he did.  But why would Death be playing with Erik the way he did.  Does Death not like Erik?  Like, Erik gets put through the wringer (and MRI machine).  What's the point of that?  Was Death just feeling a bit cheeky?  Or was Death aware that he was a character inside of a movie, which is entirely too frustrating.

But let's start talking about what I liked about the movie.  The shortest contribution is that it does something new.  I like that we have a story not about the person who escaped the tragedy, but the literal bloodline of that person.  The subtitle Bloodlines is such a trope, but Final Destination finally earned the title.  It's so good.  It plays with the wider implications of an absurd premise and I dig that a lot.  Sure, I wish we weren't seeing only Iris's family deal with the repercussions of the Sky Tower incident.  But at least it is something new to look at.

I do love Tony Todd's closure in this movie.  Yeah, we all wanted Bloodworth to be some kind of supernatural creature or maybe even the personificaiton of Death himself.  But I do like that we get a non-hamfisted origin story of this character.  It gives us enough of an insight into why this mystery figure is so knowledgable about how Death works while closing the book on a pantheon of characters all about.  If I had one gripe, Bludworth changes in this movie based on what we discover about him.  Bludworth, in the other films, almost seems gleeful about the trials that the survivors have to go through. Those clues were always cryptic because there was something sinisterly impish about the character as a whole.  Instead, Todd delivers a much more approachable version of Bludworth now that we know that he is the last survivor of the tower.  As morbid as it is to talk about this, it also raises a question of if Bludworth can die of his cancer if Stefani and Charlie didn't get smooshed by --once again --logs being transported.  (Golly, these people are aware of what phobia this franchise created and gosh darn it if they weren't going to exploit it.) 

But the final thing that I love that it retconned a retcon and made it work.  I still don't like that reviving a dead person is a loophole in the whole plan.  But at least the movie didn't ignore Final Destination 2.  The ending of Final Destination 2 always rubbed me the wrong way.  Instead, Bloodlines is a fanboy's obsession.  It's someone who tried to make all the various dumb ideas work and is mostly successful.  Like, none of it feels like it is trying too hard.  Instead, it says "There are two ways to escape Death and both are incredibly difficult."  And, to go beyond that, it also plays with the notion of tropes.  I love that Stefani is just Death's plaything at the end of the film.  We've all seen that someone breathing again is "being brought back from the dead" and the movie just calls shannanigans on that.  That kind of stuff brings me joy.

Again, these movies are about just enjoying the glee of a horror movie.  These movies seem to be filmmakers trying to gross each other out and there's something kind of sweet --if not deranged --about that kind of filmmaking.  Yeah, I'm not going to have some kind of deep moment with these films.  Instead, it's a reminder of why we go to the cinema.  We want to scream and giggle and that's what these movies are good for.  They aren't scary so much as they are surprising and fun.  So I don't regret this series.  Not one bit.