Final Destination is a movie franchise about people who escape death, so Death tracks them down and offs them in complex, gruesome ways that would make Rube Goldberg proud. Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025), on HBO MAX, gets a score of 93% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and reviews of "a scary streaming hit with a surprising amount of heart." I'm looking for beefcake and gay characters, of course.
Scene 1: A blindfolded girl is apparently going to her Sweet Sixteen party with her father. She asks for a hint, but he will only say "You'll love it!" They end up at a fancy building, the Sky Tower, with a weird fountain outside. She is thrilled: "I didn't even know it was open yet!"
"I pulled some favors, and got us on the list for opening night." How are people in movies always pulling in favors. Who are they granting this big favors for?
Transistor radio playing Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" (1963). This is the mid-1960s.
First misdirection: "Dad" is made up to look much older than "Daughter," but actually they are only eight years apart: Paul (Max Lloyd Jones, age 34) and his girlfriend Iris (Brec Bassinger, age 26)
The Evil Penny-Dropping Kid (Noah Bromley, who deserves an Oscar for his smouldering malice) is nabbed for fishing coins out of the fountain, then pushes ahead of them to get on the elevator. It is overcrowded, but the Elevator Operator (Travis Turner) says that there's plenty of room. Don't believe it. I saw that Twilight Zone episode.
Uneasy, Iris agrees to squeeze in with Paul.
The dang floor is glass! Penny Dropping Kid starts jumping up and down to scare her more.
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And they make it to the Skyview Restaurant. Unfortunately, their reservation has been cancelled, so they sit at the bar, while we see the various set-ups for the deaths and destruction: people dancing on the glass floor, a pricked finger, a chef doing a flambé, a woman singing "I came tumbling down," and so on. Back story: Iris is pregnant, but hasn't told her boyfriend yet.
They walk up the stairs to the observation deck, where Paul decides to pop the question. But then the Penny-Dropping Kid drops the penny, starting a chain reaction that reveals the structural faults and will send the whole tower tumbling down.
Down on the main floor, as the singer sings "Shout!", they all jump up and down on the glass floor. It caves in, and people fall to the ground. Lol, the parking valets are playing "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on my Head"!. Then the whole place catches on fire and explodes. The Elevator Operator tries to guide everyone down the stairs, but they crumble. He guides them onto the elevator, but it splats. The tower topples. Iris and a little boy are hanging on..,they fall and die!
Scene 2: Psych! It was just a dream. In the modern era, Stef awakes screaming during her university math lecture (in a giant lecture hall, like even the most advanced classes in movies). The Professor yells at her.
Later, in the dorm room, Stef has the same dream, and wakes up screaming. Her roommate yells at her for having the same dream every night and waking her up. The woman in her dream is named Iris -- her grandmother's name! She's dreaming about her grandma, who she never met. No wonder, she died before she could give birth to Stef's mother.
Scene 3: Stef is determined to track down her Grandma Iris and find out what the dream means. Back home, she greets her dad (Tipo Lee), who is happy to see her, and sibling Charlie, who is not. Dead end: Dad threw out all of Grandma's stuff after Mom abandoned them.
More after the break
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Misdirection 2: Sibling Charlie looks like a girl, but he uses he/him pronouns, and is played by Teo Briones, the gay kid in the Chucky tv series. I found mixed information on whether he is gay in real life.
Scene 4: Stef and Brother Charlie go to visit their cousins. On the way, she tells him that she's on academic probation because she can't sleep due to the dreams of Iris. The surliness vanishes; I don't know why they used it to establish a character tag.
Cut to Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner, left), an all-American jock, yelling at Erik (Richard Harmon), a multi-tattooed sleazoid, for not helping him find his pet turtle. I assume they are the cousins, not a gay couple.
Scene 5: Steff talks to Auntie in the kitchen (for some reason she didn't hear them talking). Then Uncle Howard (Alex Zahara). Close up of his lawnmower. I guess we know how he'll die.
"I want to talk about your mother, Iris," Stef says. "I'm having a recurring dream about her." Uncle and Auntie glance at each other in dismay.
"You can't meet her or talk to her. She is a deeply disturbed woman who screwed up your mom and me." She kept them prisoner in the house, because she was afraid they would die. Finally CPS took charge and moved them into foster care. But she tracked them down, and sent letters full of obituaries and pictures of dismembered corpses.
But Stef insists -- her life is falling apart because of this dream (how do you know your grandma can help?) -- so Auntie relents and shows her a box of letters and photos. Yep, that's the girl in her dream!
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Scene 6: Down a scary private road in the wilderness to a fort protected by massive spikes, like the zombie guards in The Walking Dead. To what used to be a mountain lodge. Crazy Lady has money.
Left: I'm running low on beefcake, so here's a potential Travis Turner
Grandma, highly suspicious, makes Steff empty her pockets and not come close. "Trying to trick me, are you?" she calls at Death.
She explains that everything in Steff's dream happened -- up to the point where they were on the sky deck. Then she got a premonition of everyone dying. She ran down to where they were stomping and shaking, and yelled that the glass floor was about to break. Everyone evacuated safely, and the restaurant closed. But Death wasn't happy: He wanted those people to die. So over the years he came back and killed them, one by one. So people who were middle-aged and elderly in 1959 have been dying? Could there be a non-supernatural explanation?
She's been keeping Death at bay for 50 years. With diet and exercise? But now she has cancer, so he'll win. Um...you're 75.
But why is Stef having the dream? Iris doesn't know, but "Death is coming for our family."
Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) was a cartoonist famous for drawing unnecessarily complicated machines, like this one for eating soup -- or is it for wiping your mouth?
Scene 7: The funeral, with Dad, Uncle, and the five cousins present (I'll bet they die in order of age.) Mom shows up, but Stef ignores her
Scene 8: The backyard barbecue, with the items carefully placed that will Rube Goldberg the family to death: a beer bottle next to the gas grill, a sharp glass shard in the ice chest, a peanut butter allergy, a trampoline, a game of Jenga. Couldn't Death just give them all heart attacks?
First the beer bottle falls over, turning on the gas, which makes the garden tools tremble. Then Charlie breaks through the trampoline, causing the Jenga players to knock it over, causing the ice shard to fall out -- Uncle Howard steps on it. At that moment a rake tumbles over, turning on the lawn mower, which eviscerates his head.
And I'm out of space, so I can't describe the wacky demises of the others.
Beefcake: None.
Top photo: Robbie the Sky Tower Security Guard. Left: A random hunk.
Heterosexism: None.
Gay Characters: Stef doesn't express any heterosexual interest. When Charlie asks if she is pregnant, she scoffs: "Don't be ridiculous," as if she's not into men.
Erik has no pictures of girls anywhere in his tattoo parlor. His phone screen is a picture of his dad kissing him
The other cousins don't express any heterosexual interest either, but they don't really react much with people outside the family. Points off for being too cowardly to make one of them "openly" gay.
My Grade: The deaths are squishy and cleverly complicated, but again, wouldn't it be easier for Death to just give them heart attacks? B-
"Chucky": Gay Kid, Murderous Doll, Small Town. What Could Go Wrong?
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