There’s still life in the old deathtraps.

 

Final Destination Bloodlines, the sixth horror movie about people who escape certain doom only for Death itself to come after them with painful ingenuity, is a terrifically well-made supernatural thriller.

 

Writers Guy Busick (Ready or Not, some recent Scream movies), Lori Evans Taylor and Jon Watts (director of the last three Spider-Man movies) and directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein have crafted an elegantly sadistic entertainment. The pace here is deliberate as complicated, lethal traps are teased, faked out, then sprung with surprise-enhanced relish. Sound character interaction, with touches of both light and dark humour, makes us care about each soon-to-be-splattered soul.

Like the writers and directors, the cast is all new to this entry—except for the late Tony Todd in his last appearance as series mainstay William Bludworth, the mortality expert, whose back story also gets explored in Bloodlines. That’s a franchise given, since few survive their first movie.

The somewhat genius wrinkle here is that all of the human targets are related to one another. Actors of different age ranges (don’t worry, most are still young and attractive) play out affections, frictions and generational trauma more effectively than the friends-and-strangers groupings that went before. This makes every individual death harder to nervously laugh off. There’s emotional depth behind the squirmy suspense.

 

Unlike in previous Finals, (Destinations? What do we call these?) a franchise launched in 2000, the opening vision of Bloodlines is not a premonition but a vivid flashback. Or is it? Regardless, the destruction of a swanky 1960s restaurant perched atop a 500-foot spire is a deft mini-disaster movie in itself.

 

The sequence also boasts a bravura display of the directors’ abilities with big built sets, IMAX cameras, wraparound volume screens and visual effects — not to mention their skills at ratcheting up tension and human interest in a deceptive, leisurely way. With a tableside flambé here and hairline cracks in the inadvisable glass dance floor there, the horror to come is foreshadowed like appetisers at an unholy dinner party.

 

For the movie’s true heroine, contemporary college student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), the Skyview calamity is a recurring nightmare that’s wrecking her sleep and grade-point average. She needs to figure out how to stop the dreams, but soon finds her real calling: trying to save her loved ones from Death’s sick sense of humour.

 

Math major Stefani’s sole advantage is that she can see the lethal elements lining up and figure out the equations for disaster. Usually too late and more often futile, but her ability adds misdirected hope and extra paranoia to the game. After the initial scepticism, she’s got her cousins, little brother Charlie (Teo Briones), and estranged mom Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt) all worked up and scheming to cheat Death.

The likes of lawnmowers, body piercings, garbage trucks and MRI machines have other ideas about that.

 

I don’t want to oversell Bloodlines. It works with the same formula as all the other Final Destination instalments: turn collections of everyday objects into murder mechanisms like the cartoonist Rube Goldberg may have imagined if he’d been a horror writer.

 

Still, this particular package has a lived-in quality that doesn’t just counterpoint the set piece mutilations but complements the franchise’s premise that death — or here, the never-seen personification Death — can come from anywhere, anytime.

 

7.5/10 Hits the spot

Boluwatife Adesina
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Boluwatife Adesina is a media writer and the helmer of the Downtown Review page. He’s probably in a cinema near you.