Watch out because death is one Mack Daddy you don’t want to mess with, especially in Final Destination: Bloodlines. This movie not only brings you the blood and fun you love about the film series, but it also brings you a ton of connections. If you blink, you might just miss out on some of the killer effects made for the big screen. The movie sees a family deal with the consequences of cheating death over generations and how that can be their downfall. It also makes connections and brings back a fan favorite into the fold for his last performance as our favorite morgue technician.
Death is an Experience in Bloodlines
The experience for this was probably one of the best and brings the series back to its roots. This movie, Bloodlines, brings all the sharks and gore from the final destination series that you expected, along with a better over-the-top, less of course. Seeing how everything connects within the final destination timeline was a pretty good move on the filmmakers’ part, meaning that each movie that we saw has some kind of connection to the others.
Bloodlines is definitely a movie you want to see in IMAX, especially for the big death scene at the beginning of the movie. This is probably the first time in a long time I heard an audience cheer for a lot of the death scenes in this film. Especially for the skyscraper scene and the hospital scene. Both scenes were probably the bloodiest in the movie, which, for this series, is what audiences want. The lead-ups to each death scene kept the audience on their feet, making the audience guess how a character is going to be taken out.
Getting To Know Some of the Victims
The characters in the movie, of course, all play some kind of trope in horror movies, but that’s what makes this movie what it is. Brec Bassinger definitely steps out as Iris for the flashback scenes. She makes you believe that she is someone who has experienced death at first hand, even if it is just in vision. Kaitlyn Santa Juan, who plays Stefani in the Bloodlines, also goes off the wall in this movie, as she starts having visions of her grandmother’s visions of the Skyview Restaurant Tower tragedy back in 1968.
You start to see Stefani driving herself over death’s plan as just like it drove her grandmother, Iris, played by Gabrielle Rose in the present day setting, insane and away from her family. She gives Stephanie a book of all of her findings of each person who survived that tragic day on the sky view. Apparently, a lot of the characters from the previous movies have some kind of connection to every person who survived that tragic day back and 1968.
Of course, the one character to get applause was William Bludworth, played by the late, great Tony Todd. We come to learn that his character all along has been working with Iris to try to cheat death because of their connection back to the Skyview Restaurant in 1968. This is where he explains the only way to beat death is by killing someone or dying yourself, and having someone bring you back. He explains that the only person who has ever done this in broken death’s plan and that person was Kimberly Corman, from Final Destination 2, played by A.J. Cook
Final Overall Destination
To watch this series, take its “chalkboard” and erase it, was probably one of the better ideas that they’ve had because that means they can start from scratch for the next movie if they’d like to. The one thing that no character will be able to ever do in this series is cheat death. It will always have a plan for each character, and even if those characters mess up that plan, it just makes a new one or even a messier one, in the case of a lot of the deaths over the years of this film series.
My overall rating for this movie is definitely a 9 out of 10. It was fun and shocking in some spots, but with the Final Destination series, you, as the audience member, are expecting the jump scares, the gore, and the fun. If you go into this expecting this to be a very serious movie, then you’ve never seen any of the previous films.
Final Destination: Bloodlines comes out for wide release on May 16th, 2025. It stars
Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Richard Harmon, Owen Joyner, Rya Kihlstedt, Anna Lore, Gabrielle Rose, Tinpo Lee, April Telek, Alex Zahara, Max Lloyd-Jones, with Brec Bassinger as Young Iris, and Tony Todd as William “J.B.” Bludworth.
