Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
For those of you who reacted to this post's subtitle with..."The Grim Reaper and who???"
Yep, we're talkin' to you, Millennials, and Gen Xers.....
Rube Goldberg was a popular, celebrated cartoonist whose fanciful, hilarious artwork delighted generations through the early to mid 20th century......
What secured him eternal fame and made his name an instantly recognizable brand, were his beloved cartoons of impossibly complicated, ridiculous inventions.....satirical contraptions designed to accomplish one blatantly simple task like wiping your face with a napkin or dropping dog food into a bowl.
(All you need do is recall the ludicrous inventions appearing in films like "The Goonies", "Gremlins", "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and entire 'Saw' series.....all of them inspired by Rube Goldberg cartoons.)
And it's clearly Goldberg's brilliant nutball contraptions that have energized all the filmmakers of the 'Final Destination' series. In each of them, Death evens the score with groups of hapless people who survived whatever catastrophic event befell them at the start of each film...
Always the malicious practical joker, the Reaper engineers astoundingly creative demises based on the screwball precision of Rube Goldberg's dizzy mechanical marvels......the grislier and gorier, the better. The 'Final Destinations' prided themselves on outdoing each showstopping, indescribable death, one after the other, decorating the films with gallons of splatter.....
Which brings us to 'Bloodlines' the 6th in the series....and for reasons we can well understand, the most critically well received.
To begin with, a far more ambitious storyline's in place, with Death now targeting the relatives of an aging family member who found a way to avoid a gloriously Grim Reaper/Rube Goldberg-ian mass casualty event.....(which naturally the film depicts in its bravura opening sequence, involving a bratty little boy and his wayward penny at a sky high Seattle Space Needle type restaurant....)
Then we're off and running to the Reaper's busy agenda, knocking off these poor relatives in all the spectacular infinitely nauseating ways that fans of this series have come to expect and demand.
No, we'll dare not spoil your fun by spilling the excruciating details.......let's just say you won't come away from the film disappointed.
The cast assembled here is sufficiently competent and features a final appearance from the late Tony Todd,("Candyman") whose ominous cadaverous cameos in the series' previous chapters pumped up the aura of dread and doom.
Beyond hardcore 'F.D.' fans, we're not sure how much appeal these films hold, what with their fatalistic outlook and sick humor practical jokery....but for those who salivate at the thought of more Rube Goldberg carnage.....'Bloodlines' will get your blood flowing.....3 stars (***).
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