Final Destination: Bloodlines
The original Final Destination in context with the era in which is was released is a pretty fresh horror film. Essentially a non-slasher slasher flick, it used a lot of tropes and predictabilities, but the entire “Death is the killer” was interesting enough for me, a kid who would stay up late to watch an airing of “Madmen” or “Pumpkinhead 2” on AMC. I rewatched the first Final Dee a few nights before seeing the new one; Tiff wanted to watch one of them before we saw the new one at Regal, and it has also had been quite a few years since I’d seen it (I’ve seen 1, 2, 3 a handful of times, never seen 4, 5… To get to your question, you don’t necessarily need to see any of them to understand what happens, although you’ll understand little Easter eggs like “Clear Rivers” and why a log truck driving by is it’s own cameo). The new one uses the same formula as the first three, but instead of a group of friends, we follow a pair of siblings, their parents, cousins, uncles: hence the “Bloodlines” in the title. The family dynamic and a lot of the dialogue between them reminded me of a Blumhouse movie: I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if somebody at Blumhouse wrote this screenplay without ever having seen a Final movie, and then they just worked some Final plot points into it. We are given this cycle that didn’t exist in the former films that death is targeting specifically this family, starting with grandma and then working his way down in order of birth: The crazy grandma has been avoiding her own death for decades, and we get a pretty great opening premonition scene, a staple in any of these movies, that takes place in a Space-Needle-like skyline restaurant that takes place in the sixties. It’s cool to get a kind of origin story for one of these movies, even if it, no matter how much you try to explain it throughout the film, doesn’t make that much sense.