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Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Euronews Culture's Film of the Week: 'Final Destination: Bloodlines' - Death gets very messy
The walk home after a Final Destination movie is rife with anxiety. Is that jagged beer can in the street about to be catapulted into my neck by a sudden breeze? And why is that construction worker up ahead… carrying a power tool?! Originally an X-Files spec script by Jeffrey Reddick — inspired by a news story about a woman that got off a plane after her mother had a premonition — each Final Destination film revolves around a bunch of foolish kids trying to outrun death's devious dice rolls. While predictable and gawky in that 2000s teen horror way, the series has always thrived on its paranoia-inducing formula: turning the seemingly mundane into the murderously absurd. If 2011's Final Destination 5 brought us full circle to the first film, directing duo Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein (Freaks, 2018) take us back to where it all began, with an ambitious sixth instalment that's dutifully disgusting. We begin in 1968, where a primped and pregnant Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) and her partner Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones) arrive at the newly opened Skyview Restaurant — a space age skyscraper resembling a UFO balanced on a terrifyingly tall Tam Tam stool. We already know this won't end well... Never one to be subtle, death soon sets its plans in motion as windows rattle, glass floors begin to crack, and an insufferable little kid chucks a coin off the roof. The result is all-out fiery carnage in which everyone — including Iris — gruesomely perishes. But unlike the franchise's usual opening premonitions, we next wake up in 2025, as Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a college student plagued by recurring nightmares about her estranged grandmother (Gabrielle Rose). After tracking Iris down at a remote safe house in the woods, she learns that her visions are not just echoes of Iris's past, but also a symptom of a family curse that won't stop until their entire bloodline is wiped out. At a time when generational trauma has become a hallmark of horror, you might be tempted to question: have the premonitions always been symbolic of our self-fulfilling cycles of fear and destruction? But don't over analyse this — all Final Destination: Bloodlines really asks of us is to cheer at some heads getting splattered and have a good time. Indeed, this might be the most self-aware franchise entry, with Lipovsky and Stein leaning into the previous films' tropes to pay homage, subvert expectations, and ramp up the gore and goofiness. Central to this are the 'new fear unlocked' death traps, and they're played out here in creatively sick fashion — one involving a super-magnetic MRI machine and nipple piercings easily enters the canon of all-time great deaths. The best thing about Bloodlines, however, is its period-set premonition that develops into an interconnecting, lore-expanding premise. You see, when Iris saved everyone at the Skyview Restaurant on that fateful day, it created one hell of a list for death. Those traps? They take time. And during that time, the doomed survivors had families, and those families had families — some of whom died from plane crashes and log trucks, wink wink. We also get long-awaited context for mortician William Bludworth, played with delicious drawl by the late Tony Todd in his final role. After explaining to Stefani's family that their only options for survival are to take another's life, or to die and be resuscitated, he snarls: 'If you fuck with death and lose, things can get very messy.' Everyone should see the film for this scene alone. But Bloodlines' bold ideas are also its downfall. The plot moves at such a hurried pace to contain it all, the opening spectacle quickly dwindles into slushy shenanigans and rushed exposition — at one point Stefani devours Iris' big scrapbook filled with potential deaths (only one book — seriously?) to create a Pepe Silvia-style timeline of events. By the third act, it feels like death has lost all inspiration, as janky CGI deaths are crammed in quick succession to no real satisfying conclusion. Then again, the strength of a Final Destination film has always rested on the creativity of its death play, and it mostly excels here. It's also always been a very silly franchise — a quality that Bloodlines fully embraces by intensifying death's slasher persona while acknowledging the ridiculousness of navigating the world as a trap: 'Stay away from that tree trimmer!' It's also bolstered by the characters of cousins Bobby (Owen Joyner) and Erik (Richard Harmon), who have some of the funniest asides in the movie — like sipping from a mug that says 'show me your kitties'. Honourable mention must also go to Paco the micro turtle and his stellar pineapple eating. Much like the victims of the films, horror franchises rarely recognise when their number's up. This year alone we've got revivals of I Know What You Did Last Summer, Saw XI, and Idle Hands. But Bloodlines at least tries to do something new while paying fan service, reminding us there's still plenty of laughs (and groans) to be found in its anxiety-inducing chaos. After all, sometimes you just want to scream with an audience at a man's head being chewed up by a lawnmower — because, as William Bludworth reminds us: 'Life is precious. Enjoy every second. You never know when…' is out in cinemas now.
Cosmopolitan
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Cosmopolitan
'Final Destination: Bloodlines' Ending Explained
If you love movies where plenty of gruesome and bloody deaths are guaranteed, then you've likely been a fan of the Final Destination franchise for quite some time. Well, the latest installment, Final Destination Bloodlines, is finally out and dear lord there's a lot to discuss. The movie starts with a flashback to 1968 when a young couple, Iris and Paul, are having a nice day out at the Skyview Restaurant tower (kinda like a more shoddily built version of the Space Needle in Seattle). There, Iris has a premonition about the tower falling into total destruction: a little boy steals a penny from a wishing fountain, then drops it into the ventilation system causing a gas leak. A chandelier breaks, causing the glass floor to crack, which sends Paul and some other guests to their deaths. An open flame then catches the whole restaurant on fire, thanks to the gas leak, and more and more people in the tower die. Iris is the second-last to fall to meet her death, followed by the penny-stealing boy. Back IRL, Iris snaps into action, taking the penny from the little boy, putting out the fire in a pan, and telling people to get off the glass floor. She saves the day and prevents everyone's now. But it's only the beginning. So how does Final Destination: Bloodlines end? Let's get into it. Cut to 56 years later and Stefani, the granddaughter of Iris, is having the same premonition of the catastrophe in the tower. It's really affecting her life, disrupting her sleep and making her not do well in school. She tries to ask her family about Iris but, honestly, they want nothing to do with her. Stefani, whose mother, Darlene, left quite a long time ago, decides to go to her uncle Howard (her mother's brother and Iris's only other child) to seek some answers, but he really doesn't want to talk about his mom. He says she's the reason Darlene became so obsessed with death and eventually ran away. Stefani manages to track down Iris, who's locked herself away in a remote cabin. Iris explains that ever since she stopped the inferno at the tower, death has been coming after not only her, but everyone who survived and any descendants they may have. Children and grandchildren are all fair game. She says the reason Stefani is having these premonitions is because Iris (and her bloodline) are next on death's roster. Stefani gets freaked out (and rightly so!) and tries to leave, but Iris proves the theory true by following her outside and promptly being impaled through the back of the head by the weather vane falling from the roof of the cabin. Darlene returns to her family but Stefani and her brother Charlie aren't totally sure how to feel after years of abandonment. Stefanie starts digging into a book that Iris gave her (before her gruesome death, ofc) that lays out who is next in line to die. Turns out death operates by first taking out the oldest child of survivors from the tower and their descendants before moving on to the next child, which means her uncle Howard is next. Stefani tries to get to Howard to warn him, but it's too late, he's had his face shredded by a lawnmower, killing him. She tries to tell the rest of her family about the fate that awaits them, but they're not necessarily all buying it—especially Erik, Howard's oldest child, who's next on the hit list. We then see Erik at work at his tattoo shop when it bursts into flames. He manages to escape the potentially fatal fire, which only further confirms his theory that Iris and Stefani's predictions are a buncha B.S. Not long after, his younger sister Julia accidentally falls into a trash can and gets crushed by a compactor, killing her. So why did death skip Erik? Turns out he was the result of an affair his mother had and wasn't really related to Howard, meaning he's not part of the bloodline and death isn't worried about killing him. With Julia dead, that means their younger brother Bobby is next. Stefani and co. are trying to hunt down J.B., the little boy from Iris' vision. He was the final survivor of the would-be tower disaster. When they find him, he turns out to be William Bludworth—a familiar face from the Final Destination franchise. J.B. tells them that it's possible to stop the chain of death by dying and being revived, but he warns that messing with death's plans can be dangerous. Erik comes up with a plan to try to save Bobby and end the chain of death. Bobby, who's deathly allergic to peanuts, will eat a few, die, and be brought back to life. Shockingly, the plan does not go well. They do have him eat the peanuts at a hospital, which is one semi-smart idea, but the MRI machine in the room they're in switches on and starts pulling in anything with metal towards it, including Erik and his many body piercings. Erik ends up getting crushed to death—seemingly a punishment for messing with death's plans. The MRI machine then pulls off the spring from the vending machine where Bobby got the peanuts, and as it's flying through the air, it impales Bobby, killing him. Darlene, Stefani, and Charlie jump in the RV and flee to Iris's cabin. Darlene says she'll just stay there and hide away so that death can't get to her, or her kids. Once they arrive, Stefani realizes her seatbelt is jammed and she can't get out of the RV. Since she's not next in line to die, she tells Charlie to go get their mom inside. But death is too quick and the cabin explodes, sending the RV into the lake. Darlene tells Charlie to go help Stefani, who's stuck and going to drown, insisting she'll be she's impaled by a falling lamppost. Charlie pulls his now-unconscious sister from the water and resuscitates her with CPR. They think that because Stefani died and Charlie brought her back to life, the deaths have to stop, right? One week after the cabin explosion, Charlie graduates from high school and it's a seemingly happy celebration, that is until one of his classmate's parents hears him saying he brought Stefani back to life and tells him Stefani didn't really die in the lake, she was just unconscious. Charlie and Stephanie realize the chain of death wasn't, in fact, broken. An old lady who's buying some lemonade drops a penny (the same penny J.B. had at the tower that Iris took away, which Iris then put in the book she gave Stefani, which Stefani then dropped at the hospital and was picked up by said old lady). The penny rolls onto a set of train tracks, causing a train to derail and crash into the neighborhood. Stefani and Charlie manage to not get run over by the train, but when some logs tumble off one of the cars, they're finally killed, because death always wins.
Euronews
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Euronews Culture's Film of the Week: 'Final Destination: Bloodlines'
The walk home after a Final Destination movie is rife with anxiety. Is that jagged beer can in the street about to be catapulted into my neck by a sudden breeze? And why is that construction worker up ahead… carrying a power tool?! Originally an X-Files spec script by Jeffrey Reddick — inspired by a news story about a woman that got off a plane after her mother had a premonition — each Final Destination film revolves around a bunch of foolish kids trying to outrun death's devious dice rolls. While predictable and gawky in that 2000s teen horror way, the series has always thrived on its paranoia-inducing formula: turning the seemingly mundane into the murderously absurd. If 2011's Final Destination 5 brought us full circle to the first film, directing duo Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein (Freaks, 2018) take us back to where it all began, with an ambitious sixth instalment that's dutifully disgusting. We begin in 1968, where a primped and pregnant Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) and her partner Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones) arrive at the newly opened Skyview Restaurant — a space age skyscraper resembling a UFO balanced on a terrifyingly tall Tam Tam stool. We already know this won't end well... Never one to be subtle, death soon sets its plans in motion as windows rattle, glass floors begin to crack, and an insufferable little kid chucks a coin off the roof. The result is all-out fiery carnage in which everyone — including Iris — gruesomely perishes. But unlike the franchise's usual opening premonitions, we next wake up in 2025, as Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a college student plagued by recurring nightmares about her estranged grandmother (Gabrielle Rose). After tracking Iris down at a remote safe house in the woods, she learns that her visions are not just echoes of Iris's past, but also a symptom of a family curse that won't stop until their entire bloodline is wiped out. At a time when generational trauma has become a hallmark of horror, you might be tempted to question: have the premonitions always been symbolic of our self-fulfilling cycles of fear and destruction? But don't over analyse this — all Final Destination: Bloodlines really asks of us is to cheer at some heads getting splattered and have a good time. Indeed, this might be the most self-aware franchise entry, with Lipovsky and Stein leaning into the previous films' tropes to pay homage, subvert expectations, and ramp up the gore and goofiness. Central to this are the 'new fear unlocked' death traps, and they're played out here in creatively sick fashion — one involving a super-magnetic MRI machine and nipple piercings easily enters the canon of all-time great Final Destination deaths. The best thing about Bloodlines, however, is its period-set premonition that develops into an interconnecting, lore-expanding premise. You see, when Iris saved everyone at the Skyview Restaurant on that fateful day, it created one hell of a list for death. Those traps? They take time. And during that time, the doomed survivors had families, and those families had families — some of whom died from plane crashes and log trucks, wink wink. We also get long-awaited context for mortician William Bludworth, played with delicious drawl by the late Tony Todd in his final role. After explaining to Stefani's family that their only options for survival are to take another's life, or to die and be resuscitated, he snarls: 'If you fuck with death and lose, things can get very messy.' Everyone should see the film for this scene alone. But Bloodlines' bold ideas are also its downfall. The plot moves at such a hurried pace to contain it all, the opening spectacle quickly dwindles into slushy shenanigans and rushed exposition — at one point Stefani devours Iris' big scrapbook filled with potential deaths (only one book — seriously?) to create a Pepe Silvia-style timeline of events. By the third act, it feels like death has lost all inspiration, as janky CGI deaths are crammed in quick succession to no real satisfying conclusion. Then again, the strength of a Final Destination film has always rested on the creativity of its death play, and it mostly excels here. It's also always been a very silly franchise — a quality that Bloodlines fully embraces by intensifying death's slasher persona while acknowledging the ridiculousness of navigating the world as a trap: 'Stay away from that tree trimmer!' It's also bolstered by the characters of cousins Bobby (Owen Joyner) and Erik (Richard Harmon), who have some of the funniest asides in the movie — like sipping from a mug that says 'show me your kitties'. Honourable mention must also go to Paco the micro turtle and his stellar pineapple eating. Much like the victims of the films, horror franchises rarely recognise when their number's up. This year alone we've got revivals of I Know What You Did Last Summer, Saw XI, and Idle Hands. But Bloodlines at least tries to do something new while paying fan service, reminding us there's still plenty of laughs (and groans) to be found in its anxiety-inducing chaos. After all, sometimes you just want to scream with an audience at a man's head being chewed up by a lawnmower — because, as William Bludworth reminds us: 'Life is precious. Enjoy every second. You never know when…' Final Destination: Bloodlines is out in cinemas now.
Time of India
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Final Destination: Bloodlines Movie Review: This franchise is still to die for
: Fraught by a bloody nightmare involving her grandmother Iris and her fiancé Paul, Stephanie Reyes is desperate to find answers. Now, with time running out, she must convince her skeptical relatives to confront the curse before it's too late.: When it comes to horror franchises that keep digging fresh graves, Final Destination still leads the pack. Built on a chillingly simple premise — you can never outrun death. It returns after 14 years with its sixth installment, Final Destination: Bloodlines. This time, directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, along with writers Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, don't try to rewrite fate, they simply give it a sharp new through the eyes of Stephanie (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a high school student plagued by disturbing dreams of her grandmother Iris (Gabrielle Rose), the story takes us back to 1968 — when a premonition saved lives at the grand opening of the Skyview Restaurant. But as always, there's a deadly catch. In this world, survival only delays the inevitable. 'Death doesn't like to be cheated,' as Iris warns — and it's a promise the film keeps with gory tension lies not in the if, but the when and more importantly, how. The film plays beautifully on this anticipation, as Stephanie's interference puts her entire bloodline in death's crosshairs. As a viewer, you're morbidly hooked, watching ordinary moments turn into ticking time the tone is a little more campy this time, it surprisingly works. There's dark humour sprinkled between the blood splatters, adding a bit of bite to the brutality. Among the cast, Erik (Richard Harmon) stands out. His tattoos and piercings offer a twisted canvas for maximum pain. But does he meet his fate? That's for viewers to find background score is loud but mostly in sync with the chaos. Each kill is creatively set up, rooted in everyday life — a franchise staple that remains strong. One moment it's a ceiling fan, the next, a stray bolt. Everyday life has never felt more the film holds up well. Christian Sebaldt's cinematography captures the eerie nostalgia of the 1960s and the cold dread of the present. Rachel O'Toole's production design keeps everything grounded, making the terror feel real. The visual effects are mostly solid, though the climax leans a bit too far into spectacle, stretching logic more than Final Destination: Bloodlines doesn't just follow the rules, it respects the roots. For longtime fans, it brings back the fear, the fun, and that familiar feeling that no one and nothing is safe. It's sharp, spooky, and quite frankly…to die for.
