Looking for spooky mayhem? Try “Final Destination: Bloodlines”
- Peggy Earle
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
4K ULTRA HD REVIEW / HDR SCREENSHOTS
College student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) has been plagued by a recurring nightmare of her grandmother Iris (Brec Bassinger) and a tragic collapse of a glass floor restaurant on top of a 500-foot tower, some 50 years ago. Stefani tries to explain to her family via a post-it note and newspaper clippings chart, that Death continues to kill members of families from oldest to youngest who survived the tower’s poor construction.
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“FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES”
4K Ultra HD & Blu-ray; 2025; R for strong violence, grisly accidents, profanity; Digital copy via Amazon Video (4K), Apple TV (4K), Fandango Home (4K), Movies Anywhere (4K), YouTube (4K)
Best extra: Commentary with co-directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky
I WAS a complete newcomer to the “Final Destination” franchise, as well as most likely being generations older than its target audience. But I have to confess that as soon as I caught on to the gory, grisly, tongue-in-cheek groove of “Bloodlines,” I threw disbelief to the wind, sat back and enjoyed every slickly-produced minute.
Not for the weak of stomach, the fun resides in the inventive ways the movie’s creators come up with to kill people. For those others who aren’t FD aficionados, the shared concept for all six (count ‘em) films in the franchise, which began in 2000, is that nobody can cheat death. Yes, we all know that, but this goes a step further than the nasty Joni Ernst town hall comment that “we’re all going to die.” The FD idea is that those who narrowly escape from impending demise remain on “death’s list,” and, therefore, will meet their (typically gruesome) fate anon.
In “Bloodlines,” the plot centers on the extended family of a woman named Iris (Brec Bassinger) who, in 1968, prevents a large group of people from dying in a newly built tower restaurant. But that’s not how it works out in the 2025 vivid recurring nightmares of Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who we later learn is Iris’s granddaughter. Stefani keeps seeing young lovers Iris and her fiancé Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones) die horribly along with everyone else, when the hastily constructed tower collapses.
Stefani’s terrifying nightmares interfere with her college studies, so she goes home to stay with her family for a while, and there she learns that Iris is still alive and living as a total recluse. Despite warnings to stay away, Stefani seeks out her grandmother Iris, who lives in a fortified compound, and who shares with Stefani her convoluted theory about the death list, and how she’s been able to stay alive.
Everyone else who survived the tower collapse met their terrible ends not long afterwards. And now, Iris warns, since she was pregnant with Stefani’s uncle when the accident happened, death will be coming to pick off the rest of her family. Got that? The remainder of the film is concerned with Stefani convincing her father, brother, uncle, aunt, and cousins that they’re all in death’s crosshairs. And then the audience gets to play a guessing game as to who’s next, and the manner in which they’ll be slaughtered, while navigating a variety of red herrings and jump scares before the gore flies. See? Fun!
VIDEO
Everything was captured on digital cameras, 12K & 6K resolution, with the VFX shots were rendered in 4K. The first act from the 1960s Sky View Tower was bathed in a warm palette and dominated with effects shots and LED paneled backgrounds. The onscreen imagery is excellent – especially the close-ups, but at times the background effect shots lack the extra clarity.
HDR10 and Dolby Vision grading provides a balanced level of shadows, midtones and controlled highlights, which accentuates the Pacific Northwest clouds, while the expanded colors give this a strong 4K watch.
AUDIO
The 4K and Blu-ray feature the expansive Dolby Atmos soundtrack, which showcases a number of height speaker clues for a complete immersion – especially from the band playing at the tower. The bass response was also very good, with the dialogue front and center.
EXTRAS
In addition to the commentary, this New Line/Warner Brothers 4K disc and the Blu-ray have other worthy featurettes, albeit with some repetition:
“Death Becomes Them: On the Set of ‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’” (6 mins.)
“The Many Deaths of Bloodlines” (5 mins.)
“The Legacy of Bludworth” (5 mins.)
In their commentary, Stein and Lipovsky explain how important the images of circles are in “Bloodlines,” including that the plot comes full circle from its beginning in the 1960s, with Paul’s romantic proposal to Iris up in the tower. But they especially wanted to hammer home the recurring theme that “circles kill,” such as a stray penny that sets off a string of increasingly dire mini-disasters.
The co-directors refer to Iris’ fear of heights and how they wanted the cinematography to “make people feel like they could fall off” the tower’s balcony. Instead of using bluescreen for some effects, the production featured something called a “virtual volume stage,” which required several LED panels with moving content to simulate views outside the picture windows of the circular restaurant. This technique provided real reflections onto objects on the actual sets.
Stein and Lipovsky discuss the dance scene, when the band is performing the classic Isley Brothers hit “Shout” which builds in intensity, with the hope that the “audience would be cringing in their seats,” as they wait for the circular dance floor to give way. During the disaster sequence, a woman in the restaurant catches fire, and the commentators gloat about the fact that the stuntwoman was the “oldest person to ever be on fire in a movie.”
Stein and Lipovsky say they encouraged the actors to do some improvising, with the result that “10%” of the improv turned out to be “gold.” The actors, they added, had a chance to workshop scenes weeks ahead of the shoot, which is “rare in movies.” Most of “Bloodlines” was filmed in Vancouver, Canada, and Iris’ compound was built from scratch just outside the city. Gabrielle Rose, who plays the old Iris, is a well-known actress in Canada. Like Iris, Stefani is a “visionary trying to warn people,” a recurring character in every FD movie.
The directors talk about a “probe lens,” which was used for “wide-angle close-ups,” such as when the camera zooms into Iris’s eye (another circle!) The goal, they say, was always to provide the audience with “visceral cringe”: A stray piece of glass falls into an ice bucket, and viewers know it will end up in somebody’s drink at the barbecue; or the slow pan honing in on the various items that could potentially wreak havoc and cause some horrible injury or death. “Everyday things are scary to the characters” and, they hope, also to the audience. After five previous FDs, the directors admit that “creating surprises” becomes an especially “tricky thing.”
The veteran horror film actor Tony Todd (“Candyman,” etc.) appeared in several of the FD movies. In “Bloodlines,” he plays an undertaker, who’s also the grown-up little boy whose mother sang in the tower restaurant’s band, and who found a way to survive death’s list. Todd was actually dying of cancer when he appeared in the film, which he said he was “very excited” to be in. The directors gave him the opportunity to ad lib his last lines. Those words brought everyone on the set to tears. He said, “Life is precious. Enjoy every second you got.”
— Peggy Earle
SPECS:
66 GB disc
True 4K mastering
Digital cameras – Blackmagic RAW (12K & 6K) 2.39:1 aspect ratio
Video bitrate: 54 Megabits per second, with a running time of 110 mins
HDR10 maximum light level: 2832 nit
Max frame average light level: 379 nit
Box Office: $138 million domestically and worldwide $285 million, with a production budget $50 million. Filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia
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