Watching "Final Destination Bloodlines" in a relatively rowdy theater, the one with the biggest screen I could find, seemed to have clouded my judgement. This sixth film in the series, all of which are unseen by me, has plot holes so big you can fit a plane, logging truck, roller coaster, race car and bridge through, yet I found myself caught up in its vile little game of sadistic manipulation. It's the horror version of "The Naked Gun," where your eyes need to dart around the screen, only instead of trying to find jokes, you are trying to locate clues as to how secondary character X will die in an elaborate and gruesome way.
Kaitlyn Santa Juana plays Stefani, a college student on academic probation; she can't get any sleep because of the same, reoccurring nightmare; she sees a young couple back in the 60's get engaged and find out their expecting, only for them and hundreds more to die a most graphic death atop a Space Needle-like restaurant on its opening night. Instead of seeking therapy or perhaps a campus counselor, she decides to ask her divorced dad (Tinpo Lee) about her estranged grandma, since the lady in her dreams both share the name: Iris. This leads her to seek out her aunt (April Telek) and uncle (Alex Zahara), who caution her that the real Iris is a dangerous old woman. As the script by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor wants to avoid getting our poor protagonist any actual help by someone trained in sleep (or even family) discord, she sets off to locate her mother's mother, who's barricaded herself deep in the woods from what looks like a zombie apocalypse.
There she meets Iris, played by Gabrielle Rose, a suspicious grandma with frazzled hair and crackly skin that no amount of Gold Bond could help. Not having left her cabin in decades, she bemoans that she's suffering from cancer. If you are wondering how she knows that if she's been a hermit for so long, the film later tries to offer an explanation by way of the late Tony Todd in a cameo, but it doesn't take a doctor to know you need a doctor for both the diagnoses and treatment, but I digress. She tells Stefani that her dream is exactly the same premonition she had all those years ago, and in a fit of panic was able to stop the ominous omen from happening. But, she warns, that her actions got in death's way, and death does not like that (hence this being film number six); throughout the years, death came for everyone who was supposed to die that day, as well as their families (who wouldn't exist had the person die in the first place). Now just Iris lives, and if death comes for her, it'll come for her children, then grandchildren, until it effectively undoes her heroic actions.
This all freaks out Stefani, who tries leaving but is forced to take Iris' "book," where she outlines all she knows about death. But then one of the series' famous kills happens, and that's all that it takes for her to believe the paranoid old matron. The rest of the family doesn't believe her, of course, because there wouldn't be much of a movie if they did, not to mention none of the imaginative assassinations.
Now this is where I found myself enjoying myself beyond reasoning; you'd see the camera focus briefly on a "tip risk" warning stuck on a vending machine, so you sit in anticipation for the execution. And then you feel the side of your lips curl in bizarre amusement when the snuff surprises you with an unexpected twist. Most of the kills are like this, as faces are crushed, bodies unnaturally bent, and so on. The camera lusts over the bloody bodies like any good exploitation film should, using its reported fifty million dollar budget on creative and intricate ways to show people meeting their violent end.
And unlike last year's "Terrifier 3," this film at least has the guts, pun intended, to show children getting killed onscreen. I'm again not for the cinematic depiction of slaughtering kids, but if your gory franchise is really only famous for their complicated death scenes, then don't go writing young ones into the script!
So I sat in sick delight until the credits rolled, and then as I lifted my excited body from the reclining leather chair, all the giant gaps in logic started to set. Characters leave crime scenes without police intervention; in fact we never see the cops involved despite one single family having multiple mutilations what seems like every day. Or what about how death is supposedly smart enough to know who someone is, where they'll be and how to off them, but not wise to a mid-story twist that should remove them from this death game? Or how death doesn't know a medical technicality a doctor would? Or how about- you know what, it doesn't matter. I enjoyed "Final Destination Bloodlines" for what it is; with Hollywood's recent love affair with belated entries in forgotten franchises of the genre, this is the best one since 2022's "Orphan: First Kill." I enjoyed this movie while watching it, just not thinking about it.
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