As the year comes to an end and the entire world is creating some variation of a personally curated Best of 2025 list, I’m here to say that it’s okay if you haven’t seen every single movie or show on each of these superlative lists. And it’s okay if your personal best lists contain some outliers, stuff that either fell under the radar this year or isn’t what you’d call a prestige hit.
While I did love critical hits like One Battle After Another and Sinners, for me, one of the most fun and entertaining films of 2025 was the one where — spoiler alert — a guy’s face is mangled by a lawnmower and a woman’s head is sheared off inside the compactor of a garbage truck. And I laughed when it all happened! I’m not sorry!
I’m talking, of course, about Final Destination: Bloodlines. My biggest regret though, is not watching it in the movie theater where an adrenaline-spiked audience could have enhanced the experience, but I still had a blast watching it home where at least I didn’t need to be self-conscious about my clammy, sweat-soaked palms.
I ended up watching Final Destination: Bloodlines after it came to HBO Max (and it’ll be included on Prime Video starting Jan. 1). The sixth installment of the Final Destination franchise (the seventh one is in development) is not just a vehicle for creatively killing off all of its characters, it’s also a little reward for anyone who has been a fan of the 25-year-old film series, featuring subtle nods to past films and the infamous deaths they spawned.
Why I loved Final Destination 6
Kaitlyn Santa Juana stars as Stefani Reyes, a college student who can’t stop seeing visions of a deadly skyscraper collapse that happened in 1969, in which her grandmother Iris is one of many dozens of people who died. (The entire vision is an elaborate 18-minute Towering Inferno-style disaster scene that’s wildly entertaining and sets up the whole rest of the movie.)
The things is that Iris, now in her 70s, is still alive, though she is a recluse who lives alone in a cabin and is convinced she will die if she steps outside her of house. Iris had these same visions that Stefani is now having back in 1969, and the reality is that they were premonitions that helped thwart the deadly building collapse, but now Iris is certain that because she disrupted Death’s plan. Death has slowly been picking off everyone who was inside that building in 1969, along with all of their family members who never should have been born.
Iris is correct, and one by one, all the members of Stefani’s family start to die in the most creative ways possible. We, the audience, know exactly what we’re in for with these movies. Any small fear that has ever crossed your mind in real life is turned into the most morbid way to die in a Final Destination film. (An entire generation of movie-goers is incapable of following behind a logging truck on the highway, I can tell you that.)
The creators of the Final Destination films are masters of taking a kernel of real-life fear and exploiting it or turning it into something even more horrifying and clever than you could imagine. In one scene, just when you think that a vending machine might fall on top of the person rocking it back and forth, it turns out, there’s another, much more unexpected way the machine can kill you. It makes you wish you were in a writers’ room to hear what possible manners of death were left on the cutting room floor.
The reason Final Destination: Bloodlines works is that it takes itself just seriously enough. The movie is based around a superstition that you can’t outrun Death, and it convincingly lays out its case in a way that feels urgent. Plenty of people in the audience believe in fate and superstitions, and this story plays with those beliefs in a smart and clever way. Because the truth is that Death is coming for us all, but for these particular victims, it’s an elaborate, grisly, always hilarious experience.
As I’ve gotten older, movies are almost exclusively a form of escapism for me. There are some subjects and situations that are too heavy, or which don’t make me feel good, and I’ve started to avoid them, opting instead for movies that make me feel better about the world. If that means watching someone get impaled by a weathervane or sliced in half by a plummeting elevator to do that for you, so be it. When Final Destination 7 is released, I’ll make sure I go to the theater so I can share the experience with others who feel the same way.
