Yesterday, I went to see Final Destination: Bloodlines. The film was directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein (Freaks, Kim Possible) and written by Guy Busick (Ready or Not, Abigail) and Lori Evans Taylor. I liked it a lot. It still had goofy death scenes, but I liked that they expanded the story by having someone in the 1960s prevent a disaster from happening because of her premonition, this being the collapse of a high-rise restaurant tower, and it leads to decades of people who avoided the disaster being killed in gruesome situations, and that her descendants weren’t meant to exist, and now they are getting picked off one by one.
The basic premise of the horror series is that someone has a premonition of a disaster, tries to warn people and saves themselves and several others, the disaster happens, and Death comes after them because they were fated to die in the tragedy. This movie switched it up, having a whole blood family line being cursed, so it made it more interesting.
I liked that the characters weren’t just made to all be jerk teenagers that you want to see die, but a regular family where you feel bad when they die, even if the death is ridiculous and over the top.
There’s also a lot of interesting talk about the cost that the grandma Iris' (Brec Bassinger and Gabrielle Rose as young and old Iris) premonition had on the family, with her being overprotective and fearful that everything was going to kill them, leading to a lot of mental illness and family estrangement over the years. Even though Iris is proven right, her scrapbook of calculations of how any random thing could kill someone, as well as collecting horrific obituaries of the survivors who avoided the disaster, does make her look insane, living in a heavily armed house in the middle of nowhere.
I did like that the movie had fake out moments of not always predicting how a scenario would play out, or someone else dying instead of the expected one. A whole scenario focuses on a piece of glass in an iced drink, and keeping suspense over who is going to be the one to swallow the glass, and it pays off in an unexpected way.
At one point, characters learn that they can break the curse if they die and are revived, and want to try to intentionally die so the ER can revive them from flatlining, and I’m thinking “I saw Flatliners, that’s just going to cause a new set of problems.”
Tony Todd, who passed away in 2024, appeared in his final cameo in the series, and while he doesn’t die in the movie, his character does talk about being terminally ill and accepting death, and the movie gave him a classy send-off scene with respect and dedicated the movie to him.
There’s an impressive stunt sequence during the disaster premonition where a stunt performer is walking fully on fire, in a take that holds on her for a good amount of time, and the stunt was performed by Yvette Ferguson, who is 71 and came out of retirement for the fire stunt in the scene, and may be the oldest person to do a stunt onscreen, or a stunt of that level.
Most of the young cast was fine, though I felt like Richard Harmon was a scene stealer as Erik, one of the cousins who works in a tattoo shop and has a sarcastic, dickish personality. The actor’s charisma made him a big standout in the cast, and he was the oldest in the young cast at age 33.
I’ve seen most of the series, mostly liking Final Destination and Final Destination 3, and this was really good as well.
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