FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES REVIEW – DEATH’S BACK, FUNNIER AND NASTIER THAN EVER

The Final Destination sequence – a more-or-less trilogy (2000, 2003, 2006) and a couple of 3D add-ons (2009, 2011) – has been the most consistent franchise in horror. Like Warner Brothers’ Road Runner cartoons, it tells the same joke over and over in ever more intricate fashions and manages to get funnier every single time. In Scream terms, Bloodlines is a requel.  You don’t need to be up to speed on what came before, but it’s more fun if you’re in the know.

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein have paid their dues; Lipovsky did a Leprechaun reboot and Dead Rising: Watchtower and has worked with Stein on smart little mutant movie Freaks and TV projects like a live-action Kim Possible and the series Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock.  They open Bloodlines with a pun on the notion of ‘elevated horror’ – a stunning 1960s-set sequence where a single bratty kid causes an astonishing series of disasters in a sky-high restaurant at the top of a concrete-and-glass needle. This even features that archetypal instrument of doom, a falling grand piano. In the present, maths whizz Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) discovers her bad dreams are down to a curse hanging over her extended family – grandmother, mother, uncle, cousins, brother. The heroine’s loved ones are set up and knocked down in expertly staged-and-edited set-pieces designed to make you paranoid about backyard barbeques, garbage collection, tattoo parlours, and hospital vending machines located too near the MRI machine.

Unlike the Screams, this doesn’t go in for celebrity casting. Juana is terrific and everyone else is as good as they have to be, with Richard Harmon a standout as an inked-up bad boy with a sentimental streak. Since disembodied malign fate is the franchise villain, the continuing thread of the Destinations has been Tony Todd, who cameoed as a knowing undertaker in the first film and is a presence in the sequels. Bloodlines features a last turn from the late actor, whose single, affecting scene affords the genre fixture a respectful send-off.  There’s a grim humour in the you-can’t-beat-Death premise, spun out in horror scenes played as deft slapstick – albeit with a Jackass-like gross-out touch – and a witty selection of life-and-death-related pop songs on the soundtrack.

Final Destination: Bloodlines is in cinemas on 14 May

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2025-05-13T16:00:58Z