Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
As the year comes to a close, and the entire world creates some variation on my personally curated Best of 2025 list, I’m here to say that it’s okay if you haven’t seen every movie or show on each of these super-lists. And it’s okay if your personal best lists contain some outliers, things that either fell under the radar this year or weren’t what we’d call a big hit.
While I loved critical hits like Battle after battle and SinnersFor me, one of the funniest and funniest movies of 2025 was one in which — spoiler alert — a man’s face was mutilated by a lawnmower and a woman was decapitated inside a garbage truck’s compactor. And I laughed when it all happened! I’m not sorry!
I’m talking, of course, about the final destination: bloodlines. My biggest regret, though, is not seeing it in a movie theater where an adrenaline-fueled audience would have enhanced the experience, but I still had great fun watching it at home where at least I didn’t need to be self-conscious about my damp, sweat-soaked palms.
I ended up watching Final Destination: Bloodlines after it came out HBO Max (It will be included in Prime Video Starting January 1). The sixth installment of the Final Destination franchise (Part 7 is currently out). development) isn’t just a way to kill off all of its characters creatively, it’s also a little bonus for anyone who was a fan of the 25-year-old film series, which features subtle nods to the previous films and the infamous deaths they caused.
Why I loved Final Destination 6
Kaitlin Santa Juana plays Stephanie Reyes, a college student who can’t stop having visions of a deadly skyscraper collapse that occurred in 1969, in which her grandmother Iris was one of dozens of people who died. (The entire vision is an elaborate 18-minute Towering Inferno-style disaster scene, which is hugely entertaining and sets up the entire rest of the movie.)
The thing is, Iris, now in her 70s, is still alive, although she is a recluse who lives alone in a shack and is convinced that she will die if she leaves her home. Iris had the same visions that Stephanie is having now in 1969, the truth is that they were premonitions that helped thwart the deadly building collapse, but Iris is now certain of it because they disrupted Death’s plan. Death was slowly hunting everyone who was inside that building in 1969, as well as all their family members who were never supposed to be born.
Iris is right, and one by one, all of Stephanie’s family members start dying in the most creative ways possible. We, the audience, know exactly what we want from these films. Any little fear you might have in real life turns into the scariest way to die in Final Destination. (An entire generation of moviegoers is unable to follow what’s behind a movie Logging truck On the highway, I can tell you that.)
The creators of the Final Destination films are masters at taking the kernel of real-life fear and exploiting it or transforming it into something scarier and smarter than you can imagine. In one scene, when you think the vending machine might fall on top of the person who’s rocking it back and forth, it turns out there’s another unexpected way the machine could kill you. It makes you wish you were in the writers room to hear what potential death methods were left on the cutting room floor.
The reason Final Destination: Bloodlines works is because it takes itself seriously enough. The film relies on the myth that you can’t beat death, and it makes its case convincingly and in a way that feels urgent. Much of the audience believes in fate and superstition, and this story plays with those beliefs in a clever and clever way. Because the truth is that death He is Coming for all of us, but for these victims in particular, it is a complex, horrific and always funny experience.
As I’ve gotten older, movies have almost become a form of escapism for me. There are some topics and situations that are so heavy, or just don’t make me feel good, that I’ve started avoiding them, choosing instead movies that make me feel better about the world. If that means watching someone get impaled by a weather vane or sliced in half by a descending elevator to do it for you, so be it. When Final Destination 7 is released, I will make sure I go to the theater so I can share the experience with others who feel the same way.