Final Destination Bloodlines Blu-ray Review: The Road Less Travelled

Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s Final Destination Bloodlines, the sixth and latest installment in the series, is a slightly different beast from the first five films. Typically, a Final Destination movie opens with a person having a premonition about an oncoming disaster. They make a ruckus that helps to save half a dozen people or so. This is considered cheating death, and the survivors go on to lose their lives in particularly complex and gruesome ways during the remaining film. Bloodlines, however, starts with college student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) having recurring nightmares of her grandmother Iris’s (Gabrielle Rose) premonition from half a century ago.

Iris’s premonition takes place at the opening of the Skyview restaurant, a place that looks almost exactly like Seattle’s Space Needle but is not supposed to be Seattle’s Space Needle. At the Skyview, a series of seemingly unrelated events lead to the complete destruction of the building and absolutely everybody dies in grisly ways. After the premonition, Iris is able to convince everyone to stop dancing on the glass dance floor – this breaks the chain of disaster, and Iris’s actions save more than a hundred people. Death has a lot of work ahead of him as he takes it on himself to not only kill everyone who survived the Skyview, but all of the children they would not have had if the disaster had gone to plan. Over the years, Death goes after each family based on the order they were supposed to die.

The last survivor from the Skyview, who was a small boy at the time, is none other than William Bludworth (Tony Todd in his final performance). Bludworth, or in one film, just his voice, makes an appearance in most of the Final Destination movies. He informs Stefani that Death is on his way and will next target Iris’s children and grandchildren. Bludworth also says that there are two ways to cheat death: by taking another person’s life, or becoming clinically dead and then being resuscitated. Bludworth has lots of advice during the series, and it is a recurring joke that none of them actually work.

For the first time in a Final Destination movie, Bloodlines gives us fully fleshed-out characters with clear relationships and back stories. This does not mean that Bloodlines is the best of the Final Destination films (if you are wondering, #5 hits the most sweet spots), but it is close. We care about the people this time even though hoping for a survival here and there is futile. It is also a funnier than usual Final Destination thanks to a couple stand-out performances and obvious work on the part of the screenwriters to add more laughs. All this characterization has a price, though: because there are real characters, more time is given to family dramas than to pulverizing body parts. There is still blood and gore – it just does not come at the pace to which we’ve become accustomed.

Special Features:

• Commentary with Directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky
• Death Becomes Them: On the Set of Final Destination Bloodlines
• The Many Deaths of Bloodlines
• The Legacy of Bludworth

The special features are a nice addition, and the tribute to Tony Todd is informative and inspirational. Final Destination Bloodlines may feel slower than the typical Final Destination movie, but the family drama and comedic additions make it worth your time.