“I know death hath ten thousand several doors for men to take their exits,” the Duchess of Malfi remarked in John Webster’s greatest play. “Just ten thousand? Ha! Hold my pint,” the folk behind the amusing Final Destination series remarked close to 400 years later.
The invention brought to dispatching endless characters since the first film, in 2000, has been prodigious. The running gag remains the same. A group of people evade a potentially fatal disaster, but Death demands the prize he was denied. Each perishes in hilariously extravagant fashion that suggests the drawings of W Heath Robinson or the ancient board game Mousetrap. This bowling ball knocks over this ladder that seesaws this plank at the other end of which this carving knife is conveniently resting. And so on.
A full 14 years after Final Destination 5, the new film begins in the 1960s with young Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) being taken by her boyfriend to a rooftop restaurant at the top of a perilous-looking tower. The dancefloor is glass. Chefs are doing a great deal with naked flames. People are standing perilously close to the edge of the viewing balcony. Half the fun of these things is guessing from which direction the mayhem will come.
Anyway, as Final Destination veterans will have guessed, the film turns out to be more about who survives than who dies. Sixty years later Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is one of several descendants of a reveller who wasn’t supposed to get out alive. Now they are set to meet the most resourceful of grim reapers.
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Bloodlines, after that first-class opening section, isn’t quite so clever in its constructions as were the earlier episodes. There is more reliance on out-of-nowhere splatter than on amusingly inevitable disaster. It is to the film-makers’ credit that, after all this time, one is still taken aback by just how bloodthirsty they can be in what is essentially a comedy. Oh well. It worked for Tom and Jerry.
The film reaches extraordinary – and sobering – poignancy through the late appearance of Tony Todd, looking gaunt as the series regular William Bludworth, to tell us about the unavoidability of death. Todd, best known as Candyman, died in November last year.
In cinemas from Friday, May 16th, with previews from Wednesday, May 14th
