If you had told me at the start of 2025 that there would be two great Final Destination movies releasing this year, I would have told you that you were insane. Alas, here we are halfway through the year, and two of the most entertaining times I have had at the cinema have been Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey (which is ostensibly a Stephen King-inspired riff on Final Destination) and now Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s Final Destination Bloodlines.
TRAILER
TOP TAKEAWAYS
A Great Sixth Installment? Yes, Please.
Being the sixth installment is a long-running horror franchise is a total gamble in terms of quality. On the one hand, I don’t think even the most ardent of horror hounds is going to bat for Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers or Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare as the best entries in their respective franchises. On the other hand, sequels like Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives and Saw VI are bona fide high watermarks. Delightfully, Final Destination Bloodlines is far more the latter than it is the former. In fact, Bloodlines is a hooting-and-hollering-inducing good time at the movies that is probably the funniest, goriest, and most cinematically ambitious film of its franchise.
The screenplay, as written by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor (with an additional ‘story by’ credit given to Jon Watts of all people), does a fantastic job of reviving the horror franchise that has been dormant for over a decade at this point, in a fresh and fun fashion. In an age where so many late-addition horror sequels opt for the overt trappings and formulas of a legacy sequel, Final Destination Bloodlines offers up fresh meat for the carving and is all the better for it. Whereas many legacy sequels opt to simply rehash the original film and ignore the latter sequels prior to it, Bloodlines takes the sum total of the Final Destination franchise and just runs with it. I wouldn’t say that it is revelatory in its writing, but it does present a nice blend of reverence for what has come before and subversive nose-thumbing. The result is a joy ride that anyone can appreciate, but that is specifically calibrated to deliver maximum thrill-age to those who know the prior films.
The Prologue is a Phenomenal Opening Salvo
The cold-open premonition setpiece has become a trademark of the Final Destination franchise. From exploding planes to insane highway pile-ups to collapsing bridges, the series seemed to have seen it all. Hell, they even essentially redid the car pile-up one already in an earlier sequel, just transplanting it to a racetrack instead of a highway because the well was running dry. But Bloodlines comes out of the gate swinging with a ’60s-set prologue that tackles the collapse of a skyscraper restaurant. Not only does this prologue absolutely fucking rule, not only is it an instant all-timer that bests every single other premonition scene from across the series, but it is also so good that the rest of the film can’t help but kind of suffer by comparison.
Everything about this sequence plays like directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein strutting their stuff and setting the tone for precisely what kind of film Final Destination Bloodlines is going to be. Allegedly, the budget for the film was $50 million (far more than your average horror film these days) and every cent of that money feels like it can be seen onscreen during this sequence. It’s a big, grandiose, expansive sequence that makes a meal out of every morsel. It’s gruesome, bitingly funny, and just a rip-roaring good time.
The Characters Suffer
Sadly, as mentioned, the transition to the film’s story proper following this prologue takes a bit of an adjustment period. There’s a new wrinkle added to the proceedings that bucks tradition and has the potential to thrust audiences into the modern-day portion of the story in theory, but it just doesn’t quite work in execution. Instead, it feels kind of incongruous as a transition and makes it all the harder on the film to endear a brand new batch of (a bunch of ) characters to the audience before shit starts hitting the fan again.
The film does eventually overcome this hurdle enough for the remainder of the film to still be incredibly enjoyable, but there is a notable disconnect. I found the interpersonal relationships of the characters in the prologue to be well-defined and even occasionally deft in their emotional touches, whereas I found that degree of poignancy to be sorely lacking from the mainline bunch. The degree to which this matters is debatable, as even the characters in the film kind of acknowledge that’s not exactly what audiences are here for, but it’s still worth a mention.
Painfully Suspenseful Kills
The Final Destination franchise is notorious in pop culture for its Rube Goldberg-ian kill sequences. However, an element that seems to be lost in the conversation surrounding these films is the degree to which they are anchored in classical cinematic suspense techniques. The films are overt exercises in Hitchcock-ian cinematic suspense and always have been, but Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein understand this and utilize it to an insane degree. Every single one of the film’s big setpieces does a great job of not only layering in multiple elements so that the film can cut back and forth between them, building tension and suspense around which domino will fall first, but also in just functioning in fascinating ways, filmically.
From the very opening of the film, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein and cinematographer Christian Sebaldt go out of their way to showcase lots of inventive visual language around the building of suspense, and in tandem with Sabrina Pitre’s succinct and insightful editing, it works wonders.
The Ending
One of my favorite things about the Final Destination franchise is the way in which the whole thing essentially acts as a giant metaphor for horror filmmaking. As an abstract antagonist that doesn’t physically appear onscreen but instead orchestrates events from beyond the bounds of the frame, Death is equivalent to the filmmakers themselves. Final Destination Bloodlines takes this to the next level with its ending, which acts as the ultimate payoff to not only the film’s opening, but also several decades worth of filmmaking and storytelling. It’s bold, it’s brash, and it ends the film on such an ecclesiastic horror-hound note.
RGM GRADE
(B+)
I really enjoyed this. Final Destination Bloodlines is the exact kind of franchise horror filmmaking I am here for; respecting the foundations of the previous films while pushing in new and interesting directions with a bold cinematic vision. Can’t recommend seeing it on the biggest screen possible with a sold out crowd enough.
