Final Des­ti­na­tion: Blood­lines review – an absurd, grotesque film for our absurd, grotesque times

It’s now 25 years since Fly 180 depart­ed JFK air­port bound for Paris and prompt­ly blew up above the New York sky­line. In the inter­im, count­less unfor­tu­nate souls have per­ished at the hands of the Final Des­ti­na­tion fran­chise in myr­i­ad cre­ative ways. Logs, lifts, pool drains and tan­ning beds are just a few of the unlike­ly cul­prits for some of the most mem­o­rable on-screen deaths in New Line Cinema’s long-run­ning death-obsessed series, which last received an instal­ment in 2014. But the sick souls who love watch­ing death at work can final­ly rejoice: he’s back and more blood­thirsty than ever.

Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein serve as co-direc­tors – a duo hith­er­to best known for their work of 2018’s indie thriller Freaks and, er, the live-action Kim Pos­si­ble film. But they’re joined by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Tay­lor on script duties, with Busick hav­ing had a hand in numer­ous recent hor­ror smash­es includ­ing Ready or Not, the 2022 Scream reboot, and last year’s vam­pire home inva­sion break­out Abi­gail. But for all the slight unknown quan­ti­ties at play with Blood­lines, there was one green flag from the off: the return of fran­chise totem Tony Todd, who sad­ly passed away in 2024 from can­cer, after pro­duc­tion had wrapped.

Todd returns as William Blud­worth, the bari­tone coro­ner who has a sto­ried his­to­ry with death, one of the few peo­ple with­in the Final Des­ti­na­tion uni­verse who under­stands the rules of the sick and twist­ed game. His role here is small, but brings with it a sense of poignan­cy, not least because it seems like a fit­ting trib­ute to a hor­ror icon (and decid­ed­ly more than he was afford­ed by the Acad­e­my dur­ing this year’s Oscars In Memorium).

But from the old to the new: Blood­lines opens on a sky-high restau­rant in 1968, as a young cou­ple attempt to score a table. If you know any­thing about Final Des­ti­na­tion, it’s that the open­ing scene of the film will always unrav­el into gory chaos, and that’s very much the case here. (No prizes for guess­ing how a restau­rant with a glass floor atop a nee­dle-thin tow­er might be a prime set­ting for some carnage.)

We smash cut to the present, as col­lege stu­dent Ste­fani Reyes (Kait­lyn San­ta Jua­na) awak­ens scream­ing from a recur­ring night­mare. Deeply dis­turbed by her hyper­re­al­is­tic gory dreams, she sets out to uncov­er some trag­ic famil­ial his­to­ry, along­side her younger broth­er Char­lie (Teo Briones) and cousins Erik (Richard Har­mon), Julia (Anna Lore) and Bob­by (Owen Patrick Joyner).

Let’s not beat around the bush. If you’ve seen any (or all) of the Final Des­ti­na­tion films, you prob­a­bly know that they fol­low a cer­tain for­mu­la. The per­verse plea­sure that comes from these films is root­ed in their famil­iar­i­ty. Death is always com­ing, when just don’t know how or when. As the Final Des­ti­na­tion films have piled up like so many bod­ies, so has the Rube Gold­berg machine qual­i­ty of their exe­cu­tions. Here even a hum­ble leaf blow­er becomes a har­bin­ger of doom.

There’s no hope of Final Des­ti­na­tion: Blood­lines con­vert­ing any fran­chise agnos­tics – this is a super­size por­tion of what fans have come to know and love. Yet some­how, where fan ser­vice is usu­al­ly con­sid­ered a neg­a­tive, here it feels affec­tion­ate and sat­is­fy­ing. There’s no Mar­vel-esque attempt to spin Final Des­ti­na­tion out into var­i­ous sub brands, and the humour remains as sick and twist­ed as ever. The act­ing too is ropey at best (aside from stand­outs Todd and Richard Har­mon, as the sar­don­ic tat­too artist Erik) but even that seems to work with­in the con­text of this schlocky delight. Be warned, though: you may nev­er look at an MRI machine in the same way again.

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