Death is an eternally thirsty bitch...
dirs: Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein
2025
It’s hard to go wrong with such a great horror premise. They’ve gotten six films out of this flimsy premise. All of the flicks are virtually the same, and it doesn’t matter. They all go the same way, and no-one survives in the end.
The reason for that is, that Death is a petty bitch and always gets his way in the end.
The first film set the template: someone about to do something has a premonition that they and a large group of other people (depending on the budget) are going to die. They stop the activity, whether it’s catching a flight or going on a rollercoaster ride, they and their peeps get off or out of the thing, the thing goes ahead and kills everyone else, and then Death starts stalking those who ‘cheated’ until they’re all dead too.
The one mainstay of all the entries is the appearance of horror legend Tony Todd. You don’t know who Tony Todd is? Well, he played the same cameo role in all these films as a coroner, pathologist? Mortician, whatever. But his far more famous role was as The Candyman in the legendary flicks from the 90s (not so much the pretentious remake). And a tonne of other stuff, including The Crow, but he’s also been the mainstay of these films, at critical points, explaining to the protagonists that they’re all fucked.
And he does so here, again, for the last time, since he mentions in the movie that Death has finally come for him too, with cancer, and he died soon after filming his touching scenes here. As a tribute to the man with the subterranean voice, they also incorporate his story into the fabric of the films further by giving him a link to all the shenanigans that we’ve been watching in general, but specifically to the protagonists of this flick.
As all these films do, this flick opens with people doing something that goes horribly wrong. Death is meant to only have it in for people after they defy him, but this time the setup is just too juicy, and Death wants all the souls. A young couple in the, I dunno, 60s maybe, are trying to go to a dinner in a newly opened restaurant at the top of tower. It looks like the Space Needle, if you need a reference point. What’s the Space Needle, you might be asking? Famous landmark in Seattle? Well, maybe I should be putting it into more of an Australian context. Like Centrepoint Tower in Sydney? Revolving restaurants, observation decks, that kind of thing. Architectural objects that defy both God and good taste? Things that should not be?
From the start, because we know what film we signed up for, we assume that the accumulation of little moments, little things going wrong, are going to escalate until there’s an absolute cataclysm. What we are provided with is an opening smorgasbord of death, with so many people, the innocent and the guilty alike, biting the big one in comic and gratuitous fashion.
And then there’s the reversion, as in, the person having the premonition inhaling in terror as they come to. Except this time it’s not the woman who foresaw all those experiences in the tower, it’s someone else. Someone much else?
The granddaughter of the woman who foresaw the collapse of the tower is the one plagued by nightmares. Why is she plagued by nightmares of the tower collapse currently? Because Death has decided “fuck it” after 60 years, and has decided that now is time to collect. Death can wait no longer for the souls that are his due.
Seems a bit arbitrary, but that’s just me. Unlike the other flicks, where Death just wanted the fuckers that just slipped out of his grasp, Death wants everyone. All of those people who should have died in the tower collapse, plus all of the kids they went on to have.
I mean, that seems beyond harsh, but then otherwise we wouldn’t have a horror movie where small things going wrong results in people dying in increasingly macabre ways. The deaths are so quick, like lightning strikes, so that even when they’re impossibly gory, the flick has already moved on to a new scene, with new complications where someone’s probably going to lose their head.
Enjoying a flick like this doesn’t make you a bad person. I laughed at most of these shockingly elaborate kills, even as everything is telegraphed well before hand, but while Death / Old Testament God is definitely a sadistic prick, we are not delighting in people’s suffering.
We think, like our protagonists think, that they’re may be a way out, a way to cheat Death yet again. Maybe if they do this or do that, or maybe if they don’t do that, then everything could be okay. Illusions are by their nature sweet.
There is something of an underlying theme, being that family estrangement can occur even when people have good intentions, or are trying to protect their families (from Death), but that it doesn’t make up for the trauma of abandonment and the feelings of worthlessness that a person can grow up with (until Death comes and kills them personally).
But it’s hard, it’s really hard to take anything like that seriously in a flick that kills people with anything and everything that comes to hand.
The grandmother locked herself away to defy Death, so naturally the second the granddaughter comes around, the woman has to die, but not before imparting her knowledge of how Death uses random shit to kill people if he feels like it. From then on, it’s Stefani’s (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) role to tell people that Death is coming, and every single other character’s job to deflect, defer, deny that she’s right (until Death comes and kills them with a fire extinguisher or a pencil or an umbrella or a weather vane or any other thing that appears on screen).
She has it all worked out. She has a book with the writings of a person driven made by paranoia and anxiety, and a vague understanding of what order people are going to die in, but imperfect knowledge. So in desperately trying to save her cousins, who think she’s batshit crazy, she doesn’t know that the script will have the oopsie in it that one of her cousins had a different father from the other siblings. And that when it seems like he’s going to die, maybe he isn’t.
Then the truth comes out. Feelings are hurt. Harsh words are spoken. But you know what? Death kills him anyway, just to remind us that we will all die, no matter how much knowledge we accumulate, or what schemes we cook up to avoid the grim reaper’s scythe.
There is no logic. We are alive for a brief period of time, and then Death comes and murders us in the most comical split second imaginable.
And just when you think our heroes, whoever they might be, might survive, Death laughs at them and us yet again.
You either enjoy these kinds of films or not. They are shocking, but they’re not really horror, no matter how gruesome. They’re way too comical, and the deaths are too quick, so quick that it almost feels like it hardly matter. Is this any better or any worse than any of the earlier flicks? I can’t really say. After the shock of the first flick, after seeing a number of endlessly inventive Rube Goldberg-processes where a bunch of inanimate objects conspire to give Death his due, well, everything else might feel like an endless retread.
I still found this flick highly amusing, and probably the best since the first two. They should stop now, but they won’t stop. They can’t. They need to keep milking it until Death himself comes for them. And even then they won’t stop, because someone will replace them and keep milking until the cow goes dry, and then they’ll keep going anyway.
You know they will. They keep wanting to make the title ironic by having it become more and more absurd, because it’s a destination that’s anything but final because they keep coming back for more.
Final Destination: No, We Swear, this is the Last Time, Promise
7 times my death probably won’t be as amusing but it could involve a tattoo needle, alcohol and a giraffe somehow out of 10
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“I intend to enjoy the time I have left, and I suggest you do the same. Life is precious. Enjoy every single second. You never know when... Good luck.” – Final Destination Bloodlines
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