Stefi (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is having a rough time at uni; She's been unable to sleep for weeks thanks to a recurring dream in which she sees a young woman (Bec Bassinger) die (eventually) in a massive, deadly, very funny tragedy at a high-end restaurant on the top of a Space-Needle-type tower. The whole nightmare forms a prologue of sorts to the movie, and of course acts as the catalyst for everything that happens afterwards. It's an elaborate, impressive introduction.
About to fail her courses, and remembering her estranged grandmother's name was also Iris, Stefi decides to head back home to look for answers. She soon finds them... and then death itself starts picking off her family members, one by one, in all sort of gruesome 'accidents'.
If you've seen any of the previous five (!) Final Destinations, you know that death actually never appears - it just sets off chains of unlikely events that result in someone snuffing it in a highly sadistic, and usually grimly funny manner. It seems no one is ever able to describe these movies without mentioning Rube Goldberg devices, and I guess I'm no different.
You also know the rough shape the movie is going to take; People start dying in a series of freak "accidents". They band together, figure out a way to maybe try to avoid it from happening to them. There are a lot of fake-outs, and at the end they might succeed or they might not, it's usually impossible to care one way or another.
And that's not important, because these movies are, more than any slasher movie, all about the kills - and since the killer is basically fate*, the scriptwriters (Guy Busik, Lori Evans Taylor and Jon Watts) don't really need to worry about finding different ways for some dude to tear people apart. They can come up with all sorts of wild shit - for example: have someone sit on the drain on a large pool and get their guts pulled out through their anus**.
Part: Bloodlines adds a very slight but fun wrinkle to the formula - I'm not going to spoil the only unpredictable aspect of the movie, but it's right there in the title. Aside from that... it sure is another Final Destination movie, huh? Although one that's directed with a fair bit of enthusiasm by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein. It's a little bit clever (the film plays upon our genre literacy by lightly subverting horror clichés before inevitably indulging them), and seriously, mind-numbingly stupid; The dramatic foreshadowing is so heavily piled it gave my extraocular muscles one hell of a workout, and the characters make so many stupid decisions you're basically left cheering for their demise.
But I guess that comes with the territory; Let's not forget that the first movie in the series has a twist ending where someone dies because they don't understand basic pendular motion***.
Other than that, it's fine. Good fun as long as you can get into the spirit it's offered in (as in: enjoy it as a comedy), and one of the better installments in the series, I think (have in mind I'm not a huge fan.) No experience is needed with the rest of the previous movies - in fact, the lack of familiarity would probably work in your favour, and while there are quite a few callbacks and references, they're all firmly in easter egg territory.
This one tries to make the characters more relatable by having them all be part of a family, but it's impossible to care for these characters and their relationships when everything in the movie seems to have quotation marks around it: Here comes a "funny" part. Oh, here's some "family drama". None of it really registers.
The kills, on the other hand, do. The suspense is basic and a bit overdone, but the comedic timing is spot-on and so is the gruesome, brutal gallows humour. I'm not a fan of the gore - I know, I know, whining about CGI, but it can be done well (Smile 2 being a recent example). The carnage here, while copious and graphic, has the usual CGI problem of feeling weightless, and of making the flesh too malleable. When a glass shard pierces a foot, it has all the physicality of a red-hot butter knife going through... something a red-hot butter knife would go through really easily - I don't know, I can't think of any good example right now.
Still, that garbage truck death was rough - good job on that one, movie.
There's also a problem with the film's structure that I'm not sure any movie in this series can ever really overcome - there's a general shapelessness to the story, a lack of escalation. It's just gory set pieces, a couple revelations, more gory set pieces; The climactic scene at the end doesn't really feel any more important than the other struggles that went before.
I mean... it's fine, storytelling has never been a strong point for these series - as long as they space them out properly, there's a place for this. Say, one every five years and not five in a single decade. But it'd be nice if they added something to the formula, it's getting pretty stale.
The acting is fine - there's not a lot anyone could have done with these characters, but Santa Juana does a good job of being an engaging, variably intelligent protagonist. Richard Harmon's also fun as a very punchable douchebag (one who's got Air Supply in his sad playlist, no less!)
But the only cast member who really makes an impression is the late Tony Todd, delivering the film's sole grace note with his signature wry gravitas.
So is it worth it? Well, yeah, I think so - it's pretty entertaining, reasonably well made and it made me laugh a bunch of times. It knows exactly what it is, it's just a shame that part of that "what it is" is being really fucking dumb.
*: I like this version of death - they're an accountant, a bookkeeper, just balancing the numbers. And they're a dick about it because... who likes added work?
**: This actually happens in one of the movies; The guts come flying off a pipe at you in a very cheesy use of 3D. Which is, of course, the best possible use of 3D.
And... holy fucking shit, this really happened? I always thought it was an urban legend! It's even got a name: transanal evisceration. Man, Cannibal Corpse could make a two-disc concept album out of that.
***: In case you don't remember: a guy ducks a huge swinging, burning sign, stands up to gloat about how he cheated death, gets squished when the sign swings back. That's how they chose to end it. It's only a mediocre joke, and a good example of how these movies' idiocy can sometimes get to be a bit much.
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