Death Can’t Stop, Death Won’t Stop

Slasher movie franchises rarely stay dead for long. Even when audiences tire of a killer, their antics, or the stories built around them, all it takes is a creative person with solid vision to remake and revamp the franchise, bringing new life to the once dead killer. Take the ScreamWhat started as a meta-commentary on slasher media became just another slasher series in its own right, the Scream series then reinvented itself as a meta-commentary on meta-commentary. franchise, for example. The team at Radio Silence resurrected that series after the abysmal Scream 4, finding a way to inject new ideas, and new protagonists, into what was once thought of as a dead series.

Not every series can pull off this feat, of course. The I Know What You Did… reboot was considered pretty darn creatively bankrupt, even if it was moderately successful at the Box Office. The A Nightmare on Elm Street remake fared even worse, with fans and critics alike, although it, too, was successful enough. Both are unlikely to get sequels, though. The Candyman reboot was a solid film that failed to capture attention at the Box Office. And poor Jason has been waiting a decade and a half for someone, anyone, to just take a chance on a hulking, murderous, undead freak and love him.

Final DestinationA series of films predicated on Rube Goldberg-levels of slasher murder, the Final Destination series has gone five films (and counting) to become one of modern horror's more successful franchises. is another series that was written off by most slasher fans. The series had a good run, starting with 2000’s Final Destination through 2011’s Final Destination 5. In fact, that fifth film pulled off the trick of being a prequel to the original movie, effectively closing the loop on the whole set of stories and letting everyone involved feel like the series had reached a proper conclusion. Was there anything more to say about this series where the specter of Death sets up elaborate, Rube Goldberg traps to kill its victims? Apparently, yes, because Final Destination: Bloodlines is, in many ways, the best entry in the series yet… although it does come with some serious caveats.

Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is a college student struggling to get through her classes. She has been haunted, every time she sleeps, by a recurring dream. In the dream she sees a woman, Iris (Brec Bassinger), who went with her boyfriend, Paul Campbell (Max Lloyd-Jones), in 1969 to the opening of the Sky View, a new high-rise restaurant tower. It was to be a special night, as Paul planned to propose to Iris while Iris realized she needed to tell Paul she was pregnant. Things go off the rails, though, when Iris witnesses a series of events that leaves everyone, including Paul and herself, dead after the whole tower catches fire and collapses. Stefani wakes up every time Iris dies, impaled on a spike after falling all the way to the ground.

Stefani doesn’t understand why she keeps having this dream, over and over. That is until she realizes the woman in her dreams is her estranged grandmother (Gabrielle Rose). After confronting her family about it, Stefani goes out to her grandmother’s remote compound way out in the middle of nowhere. There it’s revealed that Iris has been studying Death’s machinations for decades and she knows what’s happening: Stefani has tapped into Iris’s own visions of that night six decades ago, a vision that helped save her life and the lives of the hundreds of people in that tower. Except, Death never lets things go and, over the six decades since that incident, Death has come for every survivor, in the order they were supposed to die. Now, finally, having worked through everyone else, Death is here for Iris… and her family, every one of whom shouldn’t have been born since Iris was supposed to die. It’s up to Stefani to read the clues and predict Death’s plans before everyone she loves is dead.

From the outset, Final Destination: Bloodlines does some things to change up the formula that had, up to this point, become so predictable. For starters, the vision that kicks off the film is very different from what we’ve seen before. Usually the hero or heroine has a premonition and they stop a bunch of people from dying. Here, though, the vision Stefani has is one that’s already come and gone, a shared premonition from an incident almost sixty years prior. It colors the film differently, adding a mystery to the first act as Stefani tries to figure out what’s even going on.

It’s an interesting hook to kick off the film as it effectively allows audience members, old and new, to get settled into the film fresh. The movie moves us into its convoluted machinations slowly, letting us get settled in (after a pretty horror-filled start) before the parade of murder begins. Plus, it’s kind of interesting seeing an event that’s already taken place, far from the lives of the people we’re actually following, letting us feel like there’s a whole long saga of death that we’re only just catching a piece of. That’s solid world building unlike anything we’ve seen in the series up until now.

The kills in the film are also pretty good. While the movie does overuse CGI, frequently distractingly so, we do have to accept that CGI effects are generally cheaper to make than practical ones. And they are in service of some pretty gnarly kills, with people dying due to getting crushed, ground up, torn apart, and skewered. The film doesn’t hold back on the blood, guts, or dismemberments, and it’s all very over-the-top. I appreciate where many of the scenes go, and just how gory they get, even if I am a practical effects snob and I feel like CGI makes everything look fake and sanitized.

The best trick the film does, though, is that it grounds itself on characters that feel real. There’s a lived in quality to many of the characters, each having their own personalities as well as dynamics between the characters that we can pick up instantly. While this should be the norm for character writing, the bare minimum we should expect for anyone included in a film, the fact is that most characters in slashers are fodder that we barely care about, the Final Destination series especially. The fact that we have solid, realized characters means that we care much more about what happens to all these people, especially as we watch them get bumped off one by one.

With all that said, the film does make a couple of serious narrative decisions that hold the film back in my eyes. For starters, the film introduces a lot of new rules for how Death works, sometimes countermanding previous rules we knew from the original films. This wouldn’t be so bad on its own if this film were simply a reboot of the series, but the movie also brings back Tony Todd for a cameo scene, playing the morgue character, J.B., he’s played in all the previous films. Everything is connected, the film says, so we have to accept that the previous rules of the series apply even as this film plays around with them.

Worse for this point, though, is that the film can’t even stick to its narrative rules. It’s established (fairly early on so this isn’t much of a spoiler) that Death is coming for everyone, and their families, in the order they were originally supposed to die. Death only seems to care about the people it’s hunting down, though, and it leaves surprisingly little collateral damage… right up until it changes up and goes for mass carnage just to kill a couple of characters. This is a betrayal of the very rules that were set up, and it feels like a rug-pull by the film just to get cheap, splashy action on screen.

And by introducing the idea that the visions can be passed on and shared, the film still leaves open the question of where these visions come from? Are the heroes supposed to get the visions so they can survive, as if some kind of angelic force is trying to intervene so it can save someone, anyone? Or do the visions come from Death as a way to fuck with people before they die, and then Death gets its jollies going around, hunting people down after with elaborate puzzles of doom? The whole concept of the visions is dropped as soon as Stefani meets her grandmother, but it’s a key plot point that the film sets up and because of that we need answers. The film never provides them, though.

The biggest sin the film commits, though, is in its ending. I won’t spoil anything here but suffice it to say that the ending of the movie betrays a lot of what the film sets up prior, ruining what was a good vibe from the rest of the film. This shouldn’t be new to any of the fans of the series as just about every film in the series has ended with a, “but wait, there’s more,” moment that changes everything, so that’s par for the course here. I just hate the way this film goes about doing it, and how much it wipes away its own good will with a few callous actions.

That doesn’t change the fact that Final Destination: Bloodlines is easily one of the best films in the series, if not the absolute best. It’s a rip-roaring horror film that absolutely builds tension every step of the way. It’s a hard film to watch at times, as the scenes can build and build and you feel like you need a break before the release finally happens. That’s great, showing that the creators really understood the assignment and knew how to get great horror from each and every setpiece they put forth.

But it is still a Final Destination film, so you have to know what you’re going into. You can’t expect this film to be anything it’s not, and for all the fun reinventions and new ideas thrown into this movie, a Final Destination movie is still going to give into its base instincts. If you can accept that then this is probably a film for you. Just realize there’s a chance you could walk away a little disappointed by the time the credits roll…