TMS Movie Review: Final Destination Bloodlines
(New Line Cinema / Warner Bros)
The month of May this year has felt like me just coasting through whatever cheesy B-movie is in theaters before the films I’m actually looking forward to finally reach theaters; specifically Chris McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning and Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme. Last week I settled on James Madigan’s Fight or Flight and this week I did the same with Zach Lipovsky & Adam B. Stein’s Final Destination: Bloodlines. Both movies are over the top gore fests that don’t take themselves seriously, and there is definitely a demographic for this kind of feature. But sadly, I am not a part of it.
When college student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) keeps having the same recurring nightmare about a group of people dying in a freak accident inside a restaurant, she returns home to see if she can receive answers on her elusively distant grandmother Iris (Gabrielle Rose), whom she believes is the young woman her bad dream is centered around. Along the way, Stefani and her family are quickly forced to dodge an eerie presence causing real freak, accidental deaths to occur.
(New Line Cinema / Warner Bros)
Brec Bassinger plays young Iris in Stefani’s recurring nightmare, Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner and Anna Lore costar as Stefani’s cousins, and Rya Kihlstedt appears as her estranged mother. Bloodlines is the 6th entry in the Final Destination horror franchise and the first release since Steven Quale’s Final Destination 5 (2011). As someone who had only seen the first two FD flicks before Bloodlines, I’ve always viewed this as on the lower end of the millennial slasher movie series, and basically Friday the 13th for my generation. Some cool death scenarios, but with majorly hokey gimmicks, corny acting and convenient plot execution in between. What you see is what you get from the very beginning to end. With Bloodlines, we get both prequel and reboot in FD lore, which will really depend on how attached you are to these movies for enjoyment. Besides being neither a casual nor longtime fan, Bloodlines’ self-aware, meta vibe made me think of Tyler Gillett & Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s Scream 5 (2022), which I did not jell with a lot of the time. Save for the opening sequence and final scene being effectively fun and ridiculously hysterical, Bloodlines is not for me. But if you’re a genuine fan of slashers or Final Destination, go for it.