The Final Destination franchise is a horror series that I greet with a warm hug. Something about these movies simultaneously triggers a nostalgia response in my brain but also as a horror fan, the consistently inventive and subtle-as-a-sledgehammer death scenes are always very exciting to watch. It’s been a long 14 years since the last Final Destination movie, and I’m thrilled to have this franchise is back in my life, and it came at sort of the perfect time. Since the pandemic, we all kind of exist in our own individual spaces where it’s easy to suspect lots of things are trying to kill us at any given moment. So why not return to the franchise that has made a generation of millennials avoid driving behind the 18-wheeler carrying tree logs? It’s the perfect time for another installment in the Final Destination franchise, and this newest entry, Final Destination Bloodlines, does not disappoint. In fact, it might be the franchise’s best film to date.

In 1968, Iris (Brec Bassinger) and her boyfriend go to dinner at the swanky new Skyview Restaurant, which strongly resembles Seattle’s Space Needle. She has a premonition that involves the restaurant collapsing, killing everyone in the building in hideously and spectacularly grotesque fashion. She is able to save a lot of lives that night, and has kept the omniscient presence of Death away for her entire life, alienating her from the outside world. Her granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is a college student who is falling behind in her courses because she is plagued by a recurring nightmare where she sees the vision her grandmother (Gabrielle Rose) saw that night, and she becomes increasingly convinced that Death is coming for her entire family, after someone dies in a freak accident at a barbecue. Can Stefani and her family put an end to the terror before Death catches up with her?

Final Destination Bloodlines is better than it has any right to be. It’s suspenseful, thrilling, hilarious and features some of this franchise’s most creative horror set pieces, or death traps. First off, the opening sequence, I think the first flashback in this franchise executed with fully elaborate period detail, unfolds in ways that are simultaneously surprising, hilarious and viscerally gross. The sequence takes its time setting up everything, and for good reason. I love the way this sequence fully locks the viewer into what this series does so well and what this film does particularly well. It’s so exciting that in the world of Final Destination, you’re watching every single object in the room with suspicion because literally anything could be the domino that falls, and wreaks havoc around it. A wind chime, a trampoline, a small shard of glass, even sunlight exposed where it shouldn’t, could set off a chain reaction that can mean certain doom for everyone around it. And that attention to detail ratchets up the tension to an almost unbearable degree. And I loved every demented minute of it.

As far as performers who stood out here, I really enjoyed Richard Harmon, who plays Erik, one of the cousins, who has his own horror set piece in a tattoo shop. He’s got charm for days and he brought a lot more to the film than I had initially anticipated. And Kaitlyn Santa Juana is a very capable lead, and she does a solid job carrying this movie. I also enjoyed Owen Patrick Joyner as Stefani’s cousin Bobby. Rya Kihlstedt is also really good as Stefani’s estranged mother who has escaped her family to protect them from Death’s shadowy forces. And the film contains the final screen performance from horror icon Tony Todd, who has appeared in previous Final Destination movies before. He shows up in exactly one scene here, and it somehow manages to be a perfect send off to him as an actor and as a presence in this genre. May we all manage to find a finale this dignified.

Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein directed this, and they’ve mostly worked in television up until this point and you’d never have known it. The scope feels bigger and more cinematic than anything this franchise has done previously. You can sometimes tell where the edits or the CGI or the green screen is happening, but in my opinion that can add to the somewhat cheesy and campy vibe present in every Final Destination movie. Lori Evans Taylor and Guy Busick wrote the screenplay and it’s very smart in the way it gets you invested in these people and makes you care about them…but not too much, as it never really hurts when these people have their encounters with the Big Bad that’s coming for every one of us. That might be the thing that sets this franchise apart from so many others like it. There is no physical manifestation of Death, there’s no big, hulking bad guy or some shadowy figure. Death is coming for every single one of us, one way or another and that primal, instinctual fear is perhaps the thing that we keep coming back to here. But Bloodlines, in particular, taps into something extremely recognizable and human, and that may be what sets this one apart.

So, as a prequel and a sequel, and the sixth film in a franchise, there is no logical reason that Final Destination Bloodlines is as good as it is. The way it seamlessly ties in every other film in this franchise and feels like what could be either the final culmination of everything we’ve done in this franchise, or a first film in a reboot series – it really could be either one – is very smart from a writing standpoint and very satisfying as a viewer. The actors here are all doing really good work and perhaps most importantly, this film does exactly what you want this franchise to do. The horror set pieces or death-traps are suspenseful, creative, elaborate and deeply funny and over-the-top in the most viscerally shocking ways. If this is the quality we’re going to approach these movies with, I would absolutely welcome another five or six sequels over the next decade. And this is perhaps how you can really tell this film was truly effective – you leave the theater looking over your shoulder a bit, and you look at benign objects on your way out with a level of suspicion, wondering how that thing could wreak havoc and kill you or others around you. You walk around with this movie on your mind for a little while, and I think that’s exactly what a Final Destination movie should do.

And as a post-pandemic Final Destination movie, this film taps into a very real primal fear that we all recognize on some level right now. As a theme park attraction of doom, the film pulls out all the stops. But the most pivotal thing is that Final Destination Bloodlines never forgets to be what’s most important – a hell of a good time at the movies.