It would be pretty easy to say that by the sixth entry into the Final Destination franchise–leaving aside that we perhaps need to stage an intervention with this series’ creatives about the meaning of the word ‘final’–that the gimmick has run dry. What evolved, or rather, did not meaningfully evolve, into a highlight reel of gory kills with the most paper-thin plot to string them together should absolutely not work as consistently as it does, even with a fourteen year break since the last entry. 

But it does. Goddamit, it does. 

Whatever you think of the other Final Destinations, and opinions vary about how many of them are hits and which are duds, Final Destination: Bloodlines assumes no prior knowledge of the prior five films but still manages to bring them all together if you’re a longtime fan.  It would be difficult to imagine what more you could possibly want from an entry this deep into the Final Destination lore, and Bloodlines somehow does fan service in a way that is uncharacteristically elegant for a series that has never, ever done anything elegantly. 

In the 1960’s, picture-perfect couple Iris and her boyfriend Paul (Brec Bassinger and Max Lloyd-Jones) cruise toward a date. Paul is about to surprise Iris with a dinner at the grand opening of the Skyview Tower (think Seattle’s Space Needle). As they arrive, things start to go wrong in increasingly ominous ways. The elevator doesn’t work quite right. The host can’t find their reservation. But Paul powers through and surprises Iris with a ring and a proposal, while Iris has a surprise of her own: she’s pregnant. 

Before the couple can celebrate, a horrible confluence of circumstances occurs to send the Skyview crashing down, killing everyone in the process. Or does it? We find out after a sixty-year jump in the timeline that Iris had a premonition that saved everyone in the Skyview, but that this act of cheating Death has the same violent and grave consequences as the other Final Destination movies depicted. Namely, increasingly Rube-Goldbergian elaborate deaths for all the survivors and their offspring. 

In the present day we meet Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) who has been plagued by nightmares about the Skyview disaster that her grandmother prevented. She returns home from college and reunites with her family, who are still reeling from the sudden departure of their mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt). Darlene experienced many of the same premonitions that her own mother Iris (Gabrielle Rose in the present day) exhibited, and fled in an effort to protect her children. This is how Bloodlines breaks from the Final Destination tradition of following the survivors of an initial incident in the film. Instead, we are picking up, decades later, with the children and grandchildren of those survivors who now face Death’s Machiavellian wrath. 

And wrath is coming. Because while Death works in mysterious ways, Bloodline has a way of explaining precisely what is about to happen while leaving the mystery, or at least the anxiety-inducing tension and surprise, of how it’s going to occur and to whom. It’s not that deep, because it doesn’t have to be, but provides exactly as much as you need to get to know these people as they meet their shocking, violent ends. It might be my own certifiable Sicko status, but every one of these kills builds like a perfect joke with a punchline that is gory and unrelenting in the way that it gleefully takes out characters that I actually care about. It reminds me a little of Godzilla Minus One in which the victims of the ‘monster’ feel compelling for one of the first times in the series. Usually I’m in the theatre to see Godzilla wreck shop, or for Death to feed bodies into a meat grinder with little regard for either the shop and the meat that makes up that part of the equation. Both in Minus One and here in Bloodlines, I find myself invested in the characters enough that it feels like a hit when they meet their makers, no matter how funny or cool the kills themselves are. That’s a testament to Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein’s intense direction and Jon Watts’ screenwriting. 

And dropped right in the middle of this tension, this series of kills so elaborate that they loop back around to the point where you find yourself (or at least I did) howling with laughter, is the late Tony Todd’s sendoff from the franchise and for all of us after his death from cancer last year. If there are any tears unshed from the prolific star of both this franchise and the Candyman films, they will probably flow forth in this scene as Bloodworth the coroner gives a perfectly written and executed farewell. It’s the emotional heart of the film, and manages to be the most memorable scene in a film that also features a pretty good degloving sequence.

Even if you have a kind of passing curiosity about the Final Destinations, Bloodlines provides for a perfect entry point into the world that’s been built over the last quarter century. It captures those films’ humour and structure while never feeling like a retread of familiar ground.  Brutal and merciless, sure, but somehow it retains a kind of whimsy in the proceedings that the folks behind the first five Final Destinations always had well in hand, whether intentionally or not. It’s the kind of vibe that’s become popular again by way of the Terrifier series and, most recently, Oz Perkins’ The Monkey but shows, for the real ones out there, that Final Destination helped pave the way for those films.

With the new life (and death) that the folks behind the film have breathed into the franchise and based on the critical and popular acclaim of Final Destination: Bloodlines, here’s hoping that Stein and Lipovsky never learn the actual meaning of the word Final.

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This review originally appeared on Biff Bam Pop and was provided because Sachin Hingoo is caught in a Rube Goldbergian death trap.