Final Destination: Bloodlines burns up the screen with another trademark opening catastrophe
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In Final Destination Bloodlines, Death is back and he's got a score to settle.
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The new horror/thriller movie, from Vancouver-based directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, opens, like other Final Destination movies, big with a 15-minute or so set piece that is wonderfully relentless in its action and tension.
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It's the late 1960s and the opening of the fancy Skyview Restaurant Tower. Dressed in their finest, the large crowd dines, drinks and dances — before things go horribly wrong and a chain of small events builds into a fiery crescendo of deadly mayhem.
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From there, the film flashes forward to modern times and a family facing inevitable tragedy as Death comes knocking.
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'Death doesn't like it when you f— with his plans,' says Iris (Gabrielle Rose), whose premonition got in the way of Death's plans for the crowd at the restaurant all those years ago.
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Iris's granddaughter, college student Stefani (Vancouver's Kaitlyn Santa Juana), is struggling at school due to a recurring nightmare about her family's demise. Sleep deprived and at wit's end, she comes home looking for answers and discovers her family is in grave danger.
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Opening May 16, Final Destination: Bloodlines comes 14 years after the last one in the horror film franchise. This latest film also, sadly, marks the last film for Final Destination stalwart (William Bludworth) and horror movie icon, Tony Todd who died last November.
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'It was really important to us that we find this narrow alley where we give the fans of the franchise lots of little nods and homages and things that are very much connected to the rest of the films, but never in a way where someone who has never seen a Final Destination movie feels out of touch or feels like there's a moment in the movie that isn't for them,' said Lipovsky, who grew up in Vancouver's West End. 'There's never this moment of someone feel like an outsider, if they haven't seen one.'
The gap between Final Destination 5 and No. 6, says Lipovsky, is likely a facility of trends in moviemaking.
'I do think that there's been a really interesting shift in horror over that time. If you think back to 14 or 15 years ago, there was bigger and more spectacle kind of horror,' said Lipovsky. 'It was before the era of streaming and all that type of stuff. Then, we entered a new space of kind of the Blumhouse era, and A24 and Neon (studios) with the kind of smaller films that did incredibly well, like Get Out and those smaller types of genre fare.'
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Lipovsky says the plan for their version was to bring the smaller approach together with the spectacle that Final Destination is known for.
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'(We wanted) characters you actually care about,' said Lipovsky. 'Not just skipping past the talking parts to get to the death, but still actually have really good drama, while still bringing in the kind of spectacle that, to some degree, gets butts in seats in theatres.'
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This latest film, like four of the other films, was shot in Vancouver and offers up nods to the area, including the opening scene set in the seafood restaurant that sits hundreds of feet above Vancouver's H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. A further inside wink is the restaurant's logo, which is based on the 20-foot stainless steel George A. Norris crab sculpture that has sat in the reflecting pond outside of the Kits Point building for almost 60 years.
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'It's such a great franchise legacy of highlighting Vancouver. The Lions Gate Bridge falls apart in Final Destination 5. And the log trucks are famous from Final Destination 2,' said Stein.
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