In Final Destination Bloodlines, giddy death traps run in the family
A little meta and unrepentantly silly, the horror franchise reboot boasts big kills and little else.
Photo: Warner Bros.
“The call of the void” refers to the subconscious desire some people have to imagine their own death. To look over a ledge and wonder what it’d be like to jump. To run the garbage disposal and look at their fleshy, vulnerable hand. To speed down the road and gaze at oncoming traffic. These intrusive thoughts are warning signals from our brain outlining worst-case scenarios. But for a character in a Final Destination movie, these are far too simple. When the heroine of Final Destination Bloodlines, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), discovers she’s inherited very specific powers of premonition, she also inherits a book that gives her the insight of a Final Destination audience member. Every innocuous scenario becomes a potential line of dominoes, with the final one somehow getting jettisoned into a loved one’s airway. It’s a meta nod to the sixth sense that’s been pissing off Death throughout the franchise, but this sixth entry isn’t trying to reinvent the Rube Goldberg machine: 14 years after Final Destination 5, Bloodlines honors a legacy of unrepentant silliness and gleeful gore with a knowing wink.
The main pivot from directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein (Freaks) concerns shifting Death’s sights from the mass of unrelated survivors of a freak accident to a specific family tree, grown from a seed that never should’ve sprouted. Stefani’s grandmother (Brec Bassinger, who grows up into the excellently campy Gabrielle Rose) foresees the explosive, fiery collapse of a Space Needle-like restaurant, preventing hundreds of deaths. Those diners—who can’t decide if they’re in the ’70s, the ’60s, or the aw-shucks ’50s—would have died in hilariously brutal ways if not for this premonition. But the exciting “Shout”-scored setpiece, one ranking among the franchise’s best and bloodiest, now haunts Stefani’s dreams in the present day. Every night she wakes screaming after watching dancers plummet from the top of the tower, snobby maître d’s and jerky Little Lord Fauntleroys alike exploding into the same sprays of CGI gibs.