I love a horror movie as much as the next Gen X kid raised on Stephen King novels hidden under the mattress and Trilogy of Terror Zuni dolls. But when my friend asked me to go see Final Destination Bloodlines last weekend, I couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen any of the films. I had a vague recollection of logs coming off a truck and beheading people. Thanks to 20 years of migraine medicine, I have cinematic amnesia and can’t remember if or when I’ve seen any film. I have pretty good long-term film memory, like the catalog of 1980s films, but I can start watching a movie after the mid-1990s (when I started having kids and clocking migraines) and not remember whether I’ve seen it or not. Cinematic amnesia is fine– I can rewatch movies with people and be surprised by film endings all over again.
In preparation for Final Destination Bloodlines, I went online and read the plot summaries for the original Final Destination (2000) and subsequent (2003, 2006, 2009, 2011) films. What I learned was that the first five films have exactly the same plot, so I don’t need to apologize for spoilers.
Plot for all six Final Destination movies: Person has a premonition of a catastrophic large-scale death event. Person intervenes to prevent death event; conflict occurs. Although deaths are temporarily prevented, Death Karma eventually prevails and since one has chosen to Fuck With Death, the Grim Reaper is extra pissed so now Death Methods with be exponentially more grisly. Moral of story: don’t fuck with death, she’s a salty old bitch with a fetish for death creativity far outside the Clue murder weapon box.
I thought the movie was pretty camp. It’s hard not to look away at some of the gratuitously gory, outlandish death scenes. I appreciated the cinematography and special effects of the opening mid-century Space Needle-style grand opening scene. It’s fun to look out as though you’re trying to warn people of the potentially bizarre, impractical ways that death may come for their characters, in performances led by Hollywood newcomer Kaitlyn Santa Juana.
Reviews of the film, which topped the box office charts this weekend after the franchise was once a slaughterhouse for critics, were pretty good. “Bloodlines might be the most self-consciously silly installment in the series, poking fun at its own improbable scenarios with meta-humor and Looney Toons-style gags,” Beatrice Loayza wrote for The New York Times. In his review for New York Magazine, critic Bilge Ebiri noted Bloodlines “confidently revives the best horror-movie franchise.”
Actor Tony Todd, who appeared in early Final Destination films and is known for Candyman, Lean on Me, and many movies and TV shows, died recently and appears posthumously in the film. In a series about the ways Death is unavoidably around every corner, there’s a subtle focus on the importance of how we treat one another. Although Todd’s character Bludworth was seen as a harbinger of something more grim in previous films, we learn he was showing people all along that Death can best be defeated by embracing life. Todd ad-libbed his final lines: "Life is precious. Enjoy every single second. You never know when."