the other day, we went to see the movie final destination: bloodlines (2025) because i needed to be made to feel less than 100% certain of my own personal safety in the face of a grundon bin. and also, obviously, just because it was playing and i’ve never met a final destination movie i didn’t like. although having said that i will concede that neither i nor anyone i have ever met likes the movie final destination 4 (2009), because it is bad, but to be fair I never claimed this substack was a space for evidence-based and accurate reporting. such is the landscape of modern journalism.
anyway.
i have always loved these movies. to paraphrase well-known pervert’s manual love actually (2003), the final destination franchise taught your cold english substack host how to feel, and also to be extremely careful around balance beams, bowflex machines, rollercoasters, canadian lumber and wicker baskets full of prosthetic arms, and for this i owe it the gratitude of many years standing. i have already written about the admirable central impulse of these movies, which is to construct complicated rube goldberg machines that result in characters getting their spines blown out of their asses, so i don't intend to use this month's edition to go over old ground, except to say that everybody knows that the best death in the final destination franchise is the sunbed scene, followed by the guy who gets his head smashed in at the gym whilst yelling fuck death over and over, thereby setting up an interesting internal morality wherein both vanity and poor gym etiquette are punishable by death. but i've already talked about this, so let's move onto the newest instalment.
(entirely by the way, this is not a substack about romantic comedies so i will refrain from expressing any opinions about the movie love actually except to say that it is extremely funny to me that the general consensus in these enlightened times appears to be that that movie is bad and unfeminist because it involves andrew lincoln stalking a child bride but not because it is a movie containing two entirely separate plotlines in which two entirely separate men are trying to fuck the help.)
anyway.
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final destination: bloodlines, i should point out from the jump, is actually a pretty great movie. as a fan of the series at large, i'm not sure exactly why i was not expecting this, except to say that something about bringing a franchise of movies in which people are routinely acupunctured to death or crushed by falling pianos into these self-conscious modern times felt something like a recipe for disaster. given that the last instalment in the franchise was released all the way back in 2011, i wasn't entirely sure i was up for a movie in which everyone reckoned articulately with the received trauma of once having witnessed a guy get cheesewired to death by a fence. we love trauma, in this the era of the movie smile (2022), which is fine as far as it goes but does take on shades of the ridiculous when applied to movies without the emotional resonance to pull it off. you will be happy to hear, then, that final destination: bloodlines has absolutely no interest in relitigating the lasting effect of anything that took place in the previous five movies and is in fact simply a movie that wants to stuff a guy dick-first into an mri machine and then turn it on. and why should it not.
we start, in the first of several interesting departures for the series, in the 1950s - although when i say 1950s i mean a sort of murder mystery dinner party 1950s where everyone's eyebrows are microbladed and no one has any very damning political views. some guy (he will not survive long enough for us to learn his name) is taking his best gal out to the grand opening of an improbably gigantic space needle-style restaurant tower which for some reason has recently been constructed in the middle of a sleepy suburban town. the fact that the space needle is the most wretched hellhouse ever built is hammered home to us by the fact that all the car park attendants are listening to the song ring of fire on their portable radios, and also by the fact that it's a space needle constructed in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.
the best gal - who we can already tell is our heroine because she is both pregnant and should probably be on zoloft - very quickly starts engaging in that time-honoured final destination tradition of noticing every single unbelievably threatening thing in her immediate vicinity, although in her defence there do seem to be a lot of them. quite apart from the general nerviness of any tall building, the space needle does appear to have been conceived, built and marketed by a team of people who together might still be ten points short of a moron. between the rickety elevator, the vigorous flambeeing going on in the open kitchen and the entirely glass high rise dancefloor, you do leave this section of the movie thinking the atomic age was perhaps less an era of promise than it was a sort of clearing ground for the criminally insane. anyway, no sooner has the best gal been proposed to by whathisface - having first noticed an evil hanging chandelier, an evil lift, an evil open fire, an evil gas vent, an evil glass floor and a small evil child throwing evil pennies off the evil viewing deck - than the building proceeds to simultaneously collapse, catch fire and blow up, which is an incredibly pleasing sequence of mad events as an opening goes. people are crushed by grand pianos, fall through the glass floor, get cut in half by the elevator and are set alight by the heating vent, and the best gal makes an effort to escape with a small child only to fall and become impaled on a very large spike.
it is at this point that the movie makes another interesting departure, as any normal final destination movie would have taken this opportunity to flip the record and show us that the best gal had simply had a nightmarish vision of the future, just in time to save several people from flaming disaster, only instead we are suddenly ripped into the present day where some entirely unrelated random woman is screaming in a lecture theatre, having just seen a vision of the burning space needle. and so it goes.
the point of final destination: bloodlines - one that is executed in the main via a series of handwaves - is that the girl from the lecture theatre is the granddaughter of the best gal, whose existence only ever came to be because the best gal did have the traditional freakout vision and consequently saved herself and several other people that night. that lecture girl is now having the same visions herself is put down to heredity and the fact that she was never meant to have lived at all, so of course death is now coming for her and her family, in entirely age-based order. death, as in all these movies, is shown up as something of a litigious creep, but now also, as my friend pointed out, strangely committed to the concept of primogeniture.
if this sounds confusing and hard to follow, it actually really isn't, but also it wouldn't matter if it were because the movie wastes absolutely no time getting down to the strict brass tacks of making sure everyone gets their faces stoved in. early on in the movie, lecture girl pays a visit to her estranged grandmother, who in the time that has passed since the 1950s has become a leathery shut-in who lives in a house entirely covered with spikes. in an effort to convince her granddaughter that the family curse is real, the erstwhile best gal first gives her a self-penned book which purports to be an exhaustive manual of all the ways to avoid death but is in fact just a lot of pen drawings with accompanying text saying things like "barbecues get hot" and "careful around lawn darts please", then steps out into the open and is immediately skewered to death by a flying weather vane. it's good.
that the movie takes quite a long time to make its point re the overdeveloped lore entirely clear is, happily, matched by the alacrity with which it then commences to plough everyone flat. shards of glass are thrown in cocktails, heads are chewed up by lawnmowers, entire humans are lifted up by ceiling fans via their septum piercings (thereby standing as a sort of awful warning to lesbians everywhere) and in one particularly memorable sequence, someone is knocked into a bin by a passing football and subsequently chewed up in a garbage truck. the curse mows its way through the family in the manner of a 90s email forward, swinging down the line from parent to child and somehow only made all the more entertaining by lecture girl cleaving desperately to what her cousin christens "gammy's death book", trying with increasingly swivel-eyed insanity to identify possible dangers like someone who's about to fail their driving theory test.*
that the late great tony todd appears at one point to give a tender pean to the concept of enjoying what life is left, rather than dwelling on the dangers, is both moving and incredibly funny given the subject matter. that this scene is immediately followed by a truly impeccable sequence in which a pair of brothers are swiftly dispatched via the dual medium of a peanut allergy and being dragged dick-first into an mri machine that for some reason appears to have an "experimental mode" only improves proceedings.
i could gripe about the ending, which admittedly both falls apart from a logical standpoint and also looks like ass, but why would i do that. final destination is back, babey, and it's really really good again.
*my wife would like it pointed out that this comment is joke-theft and pertains only to her life experience, which is fair enough because i actually passed my driving theory test first time.
JA are you TRYING to get bi girls killed via omission??