REVIEWED: Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

It’s been a full 25 years since Final Destination’s notoriously twitchy teen protagonist (Devon Sawa) abruptly abandoned his seat on a plane bound for Paris following a terrifying premonition in which its entire cargo-load of cabin crew and passengers perished in a fiery inferno. In the subsequent years and sequels that followed, the franchise’s team have done a pretty admirable job of fostering unprecedented levels of paranoia and anxiety among millennial horror fans everywhere, having spent the next decade and a half drip-feeding us an ever-expanding catalogue of grisly, elaborately orchestrated death scenes. 

From washing line strangulations and malfunctioning tanning booths-turned-George Foreman grilling appliances to that notorious logging truck scene, you’d be forgiven for thinking the ingeniously twisted minds behind this morbidly inclined franchise might, by the year 2025, be struggling to source new and fiendishly sadistic methods by which to dispatch their ill-fated victims. But with a fresh host of rigorously researched kills and an intriguing premise that situates Bloodlines in a cinematic universe that feels distinctly separate from that of its oftentimes rather formulaic predecessors, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein‘s latest instalment is a sharply-written slab of wickedly gory and overblown fun. 

With its epic, disaster movie-worthy opening scene establishing an instant, radical departure from the franchise’s altogether more humble and angsty, adolescent origins, this most recent, critically-lauded instalment wastes little time in hurling us headlong into a high-octane catastrophe of budget-blowing, Titanic-esque enormity, pairing panoramic cinematography and agonisingly slow-burning suspense to riveting effect. Set during the 1960s when a wealthy young couple are seen celebrating their engagement atop a vast, space pod-like structure reserved for only the most loftiest (ahem) echelons of high society, the aforementioned revelries are abruptly derailed when bride-to-be Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) foresees a freak accident befall the decidedly precarious-looking Sky View tower, causing its honoured guests to plummet several hundred feet to a brutal and untimely demise. 

Having cheated death and defied its intended design for both herself and the smattering of fellow survivors she heroically led to safety mere moments before catastrophe struck, Iris then quite understandably spends the next three decades of her life as a paranoid recluse holed up in a heavily booby-trapped shack in the woods dodging death’s best efforts to even the score. That is, until her estranged granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) begins poking around in her family’s mysterious past after she, too, finds herself privy to the same terrifying visions her grandmother witnessed on the fateful day she defied death but inadvertently doomed her entire bloodline to its ruthless and unrelenting pursuit. 

Featuring exceptionally inventive deployment of an industrial garbage compression unit, trampoline, runaway lawnmower and a rogue MRI machine that furnishes us with one most wondrously bizarre death scenes the horror genre has ever witnessed, Bloodlines’s frankly staggering body count far surpasses that of any of its generously gore-laden predecessors. But with this sheer volume of kills comes no compromise on quality, with each scene of gratuitous slaughter being palpably loaded with suspense and enough torturous, blood-drenched viscerality to leave even the most hardened horror hound physically squirming in their seat. Tempering the abject brutality of it all with a healthy dose of overblown cartoonish violence and a thoroughly likeable antihero in the shape of Stefani's snarky, abundantly tattoed and pierced (more on that later!) cousin Erik Campbell (Richard Harmon), and the end result is a riotously entertaining cinematic bloodbath.  

But with the exception of Harmon’s comedically brilliant turn and a wondrously moving, improvised monologue by late horror icon Tony Todd, Bloodlines is a movie otherwise bereft of absorbing character development, its sizeable cast of competently acted but ultimately one-dimensional characters functioning purely for the purpose of sating our more base, bloodthirsty appetites. Together with a largely charmless protagonist who, it has to be admitted, was singlehandedly responsible for reawakening this long-dormant family curse in the first place, Bloodlines lacks much of the heart and brooding existentialism that made the first instalment in the franchise such an enduringly beloved and iconic movie. But as far as delivering the abbatoir-level excesses of gore and creative kills we’ve long been eagerly anticipating, Bloodlines more than abundantly fulfils its fiendishly executed grand design.

7/10