Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

The world-building and mythologising reign over plot, logic, and sense in this sixth (has it really only been six?) Final Destination movie, which plays like a cartoon series - it's glossy, wonkily computer-generated in parts, and the deaths are separate mini-episodes - and it is hard to care about the family members being picked off one-by-one by Death given noone in it cares either, and anyway, the characters are always secondary to the attempts here at a origin story and attempt at a reboot, often cornball - the holed-up Death-whispering grandma doesn't belong in the series, and the death-by-peanut allergy is a low point.

★★★☆☆

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Final Destination (2000)

Death itself, not some gimmicky fiend masked or back-from-the-dead, stalks the teens in the Final Destination slasher series and this original is where the innovative concept kicks off...but not in quite the polished fashion of later instalments, for although a group of teens cheat their way out of dying in a freak accident and Death comes knocking like it does in all the FD films, Death here is a malicious fiend, occasionally visible as a shadow that passes through kitchens and down streets - like the shadows in Ghost - and occasionally a manipulator of physics, so not yet the invisible but terrifying potential of violent, body slicing and dicing domestic Rube Goldberg machines.

★★★☆☆

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The Final Destination (2009)

The inventive Final Destination series continues with this fourth movie, a especially breezy 84-minutes that feels hastily cobbled together, in which a group, this time a particularly wooden bunch of teens, cheat Death by foreseeing and escaping a freak accident, this time involving racecars at a speedway, only for Death to turn up again - and again - determined to settle the score; like always, Death takes the form of grisly Rube Goldberg machines ending in eye trauma, decapitation and the like and a few of these machines are so effective they could be used in a government campaign for workplace safety, but there is also a good number of other scenes in this particular FD instalment that are just lazily conceived moments of bloodsplatter.

★★☆☆☆

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Final Destination 5 (2011)

Again, we are introduced to a group of school kids, one of whom has premonitions that help them all escape violent death, only for these survivors to then be stalked one-by-one by Death because "Death doesn't like to be cheated", in this reasonably entertaining fifth instalment of the inventive horror series that sticks to the formula but returns the quality of the acting and the special effects back to standard after some woeful earlier sequels.

★★★☆☆

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