They say you never forget your first Final Destination. Maybe it's the image of that doomed Flight 180 tearing itself apart in the sky. Or that logging truck sequence that permanently altered how we follow vehicles on the highway.
The franchise, for all its formulaic inevitability, has always understood one thing: death, when delayed, demands flair.
After a 14-year hiatus, Final Destination: Bloodlines doesn't just dust off the old playbook - it sets it on fire, dances on the ashes, and serves up a glossy, gory, generational curse with a side of stylish mayhem.
Directed by Freaks duo Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, Bloodlines opens with what is arguably the franchise's most operatic set piece to date.
We're in the 1960s, and the Skyview - a glittering, space needle-like skyscraper - is hosting its opening night. Jazzed-up patrons twirl to The Isley Brothers' Shout, champagne flutes clink, and a stolen coin tossed into a wishing fountain sets off a Rube Goldberg chain of doom that spirals from flambeed entrees to shattering glass floors.
At the centre of it all is Iris (Brec Bassinger), whose premonition - vivid, visceral and just in time - saves several lives. Or so it seems.
Cut to the present. College student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is being haunted by relentless nightmares of the Skyview disaster.
With her academic life teetering and no plausible explanation for the specificity of her visions, Stefani returns home to dig into the mystery. Her search leads her to the revelation that Iris was her grandmother - a woman whose moment of clairvoyance half a century ago set off a butterfly effect of trauma, tragedy and now, a lethal inheritance.
Because in this sixth instalment, death isn't just following survivors - it's hunting down bloodlines. A skipped death doesn't just put you in the crosshairs. It puts your future generations on a hit list.
Stefani's family, of course, doesn't immediately buy into her premonitions. Her mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), frosty and haunted, prefers silence to stories.
Her cousins - Erik (Richard Harmon, smarmy but likeable), Julia (Anna Lore), and Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) - fall somewhere between scepticism and alarm.
Only her younger brother Charlie (Teo Briones) is truly in her corner. But belief is a luxury few can afford when the deaths start stacking up in classic Final Destination style - elaborate, gruesome and infuriatingly clever.
This time, though, there's a real sense of craft behind the carnage. The MRI scene - a standout - manages to be both darkly hilarious and absolutely horrific, thanks to a pierced victim and a magnetically fatal attraction.
A garbage truck sequence and some well-placed ceiling fan suspense feel like knowing winks to longtime fans. Lipovsky and Stein understand the series's choreography - it's not just about the kill, it's the anticipation.
The camera lingers, the score teases and your eyes scan the frame for every possible death cue, only to be wrong, wrong again, and then violently, spectacularly right.
What sets Bloodlines apart is its willingness to lean into pathos without losing its playfulness. The focus on family, not just a random gaggle of teens, brings stakes that aren't just physical but emotional.
The film touches, however lightly, on inherited trauma, the burden of survival and generational guilt. Stefani, as played by Santa Juana, is more than just a scream queen - she's frazzled, determined, and grounded in a way that feels rare for this franchise.
Gabrielle Rose, as the now elderly Iris, is quietly heartbreaking, living in self-imposed exile and still under death's shadow decades later.
And then there's William Bludworth. Tony Todd's ever-creepy mortician returns one last time, visibly frail but magnetically eerie, offering the franchise's final philosophical nugget before departing for good.
His farewell - reportedly improvised - lends the film its only truly reflective note. Not preachy, just personal. Fitting, really, for a character who's always known more than he let on.
Still, Bloodlines never forgets what it's here to do. It's a high-octane horror rollercoaster with zero patience for subtlety and maximum commitment to chaos.
Yes, some subplots veer into the gimmicky. Yes, the third act leans hard into lore-dump territory. But when you're juggling ricocheting coins, collapsing towers, deadly household appliances and exploding body parts, a little mess is part of the fun.
It's also a film that knows its history. From visual callbacks - buses, logs, tanning beds - to a score that teases familiar themes, Bloodlines is steeped in its own mythology without being suffocated by it.
Screenwriters Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, working from a story by Jon Watts, strike a surprisingly deft balance between fan service and franchise reinvention. There's a knowingness here, a refusal to take things too seriously, that makes every ridiculous death feel like a punchline and a payoff.
Final Destination: Bloodlines is not elevated horror. It doesn't want to be. It's a popcorn-drenched, viscera-slicked ballet of doom that remembers exactly why you fell in love with the franchise in the first place. It's brutal, bonkers, and - against all odds - kind of brilliant. The Reaper, it turns out, just needed a little R&R (rest and recuperation). Welcome back.
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Tony Todd, Brec Bassinger, Richard Harmon