The Stream: Bland characters that only exist to be killed.

The Big Screen: Exciting and gory kills.

The Final Bill: You wanted gory death scenes? You got ’em.

– Trip Fontaine
Director: Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein
Writers: Guy Busick & Lori Evans Taylor (screenplay by)
Stars: Tony Todd, Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Rya Kihlstedt, Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner, Anna Lore
Genre: Horror
Rating: R for strong violent/grisly accidents, and language.
Runtime: 1 hour 50 minutes
Production Companies: New Line Cinema, Inzide Media, Practical Pictures, The Fusion Media,
Platform: In theaters May 16, 2025
Notable Trailers: Megan 2.0, Relay, Together, F1, The Conjuring: Last Rites, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

Hey, Streamers! You know it’s summer movie season when there’s a new movie sequel is released each weekend. In this third weekend of May, the sixth movie in the Final Destination franchise, Final Destination: Bloodlines, opened in theaters. Yes, characters are still trying to cheat death, and death is coming for them in even more elaborate in bloody ways. Here, we follow Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a college student who is having recurrent nightmares about the gruesome death of her grandmother in the 1960’s. In order to get these dreams to stop, Stefani returns home to talk to her uncle about her grandmother. Lots of family secrets are revealed as death comes for Stefani and her grandmother’s “bloodline.” Get it? Gory kills and death-cheating hijinks ensue.

It’s a Final Destination movie, so if you’ve seen one, then you get the gist. In Bloodlines, the screenplay attempts to connect an incident from the past to a present threat, which adds a layer of intrigue to the otherwise predictable plot. When the movie takes time away from the gruesome kills to explain the connections that are occurring, the energy takes a big dip and gets pretty dull. You’re really just waiting for the next gory set piece to occur. Moreover, the characters are so generic and bland that it really doesn’t matter what happens to any of them. It’s like a videogame where these people just exist to die. Now, these kill scenes are pretty good overall. There are unexpected and inventive things that lead to character deaths. That’s all you really come to these Final Destination movies for, and this movie delivers on that. Nevertheless, I don’t know that this compilation of death sequences warrants a trip to the movie theater.

Ultimately, Final Destination: Bloodlines is exactly what you would expect from a Final Destination movie: inventive kills, a little bit of lore to propel the story, the occasional humor, thrilling moments, and a blank slate cast full of cannon fodder. Anyway, Final Destination: Bloodlines seems like a straight to DVD kind of movie, so no need to rush out to the theater for it.