William Bludworth! Kurn, son of Mogh! Candyman! Zoom! Adult Jake Sisko! And more, more, more! R.I.P., good sir.

Once upon a time the original Final Destination was my favorite film I saw in theaters in the year 2000, outranking other notable releases such as the Best Picture-winning Gladiator, the higher-budgeted X-Men, and the even more intricate Chicken Run. Created by screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick and flown to the finish line by the X-Files/Millennium writer/producer team of Glen Morgan and James Wong, the supernatural slasher-flick was more than its novelty of teens being hunted by the voiceless, incorporeal force of Death Itself via ludicrous chain-reaction accidents. Sure, those grotesque executions were more unpredictable than your typical arsenal of cutlery and farming tools, and as a comics fan I took some pride in knowing Rube Goldberg’s work before I saw it and name-checking him for comparison’s sake before everyone else was doing it.

Taking a peculiar place in the post-Scream slasher revival, the imaginative precursor to 1000 Ways to Die posed a loftier pretension than psychopathic B-movie slaughter. Death’s unspoken yet swiftly inferred motive for its Most Dangerous Game kill-spree was, arguably in the strictest sense, not motivated by pure or even petty evil. From a higher plane of perspective, the entire cast was “supposed” to die in the first twenty minutes, which would’ve made for a fairly pointless short. As the students who escaped the opening plane disaster soon find themselves perishing one by one, their increasingly frantic debates and rationalizations explore the time-honored thematic conflict of destiny versus free will — the integrity of maintaining The Grand Scheme of Things versus the Terminator series’ philosophy of “There is no fate but what we make”, which in turn was backstabbed by Terminator 3‘s contrarian stance that some catastrophes are a fixed point in time, no matter how hard we push back.

In Morgan and Wong’s hands the battle between Humanity and Nature was somehow electrifying (literally so in the climax) even though it often boiled down to people fighting their own rebellious possessions. Call it The Brave Little Toaster Has Had It Up to HERE. It was a thoughtfully brutal, self-contained piece. So of course there had to be sequels with diminishing returns. (None of them to date have explored the most obvious follow-up: what if Death’s quest was indeed justified and a survivor of one of these films grew up to become Future Hitler? For all we know Mary Elizabeth Winstead outlived the third one and went on to manifest the second coming of Edith Keeler.)

After Final Destination 2 opened with one of the all-time greatest car-crash sequences in the hands of eventual Snakes on a Plane director David R. Ellis, its momentum flagged into decrescendo and petered out by the end. The next one proved so disappointing (despite the return of Morgan and Wong) that I never saw the fourth or fifth ones before I decided to go catch the series’ surprisingly popular comeback, Final Destination Bloodlines. If you’ve seen at least one of these before, you get the gist and won’t feel left out as other, more committed viewers nod at any motifs we skippers missed.

Incoming directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein (the live-action Kim Possible movie) spice up the formula by making the requisite prologue massacre a period piece, in which we learn Death has been experiencing technical difficulties possibly as far back as 1963. (An olde-tyme car radio pipes “Ring of Fire” as creepy foreshadowing.) Maybe Death should have a team of quality-assurance demons investigate why all those lifesaving premonitions keep leaking. Anyway, everything goes wrong at the grand opening of a posh, 500-foot-tall spacy-needly restaurant with a glass ballroom dance floor. Its construction was reportedly finished five months ahead of schedule, which is only the first of myriad impossible feats to come.

Just like the Titanic, a colossal monument to man’s hubris with its own house band is soon devastated by a primal elemental force activated by damage from an unexpected object. People and things are shattered, blood flows, a Tom-and-Jerry piano lands perfectly wrongly, and the scene resets and restarts — all a telltale vision in the mind’s eye of a young lady named Iris (Brec Bassinger, formerly TV’s Stargirl!) who’s just watched the first take of her big date go horridly awry and now gets a do-over to save lives. Fortunately she’s believable in her big Cassandra moment and the night ends quite differently for her and dozens of fellow customers, if not necessarily for the restaurant’s insurance company.

Fast-forward to today: Kaitlyn Santa Juana (I saw her in two episodes of The Flash) is a college student named Stefani who’s one of Iris’ several living descendants. Iris bailed on their fractured family from which long ago, but Stefani seeks her out after Grandma’s 60-year-old portent one day becomes her own recurring nightmare (a bit of a lore-break — the visions aren’t usually transferable, definitely not after decades of dormancy). Grandma Iris consults her Necronomicon-sized conspiracy journal and quickly figures out the film’s whole plot: her bygone act of heroism changed the timeline and resulted in entire lineages that shouldn’t have existed after the spindly club disaster. At some point Death eventually began course-correcting and has been taking its sweet glacial time stalking the saved and their progeny, generally eliminating them through methods outlandish enough to merit clippable newspaper articles about them. Viruses, strokes, and home invasions are too commonplace to be proper tools for this franchise’s version of Marvel’s TVA.

Hence Death comes a-rampaging, a lumberjack taking out entire family trees that defied its logging schedule, and Stefani’s kin are next on the chopping block. Fans know the usual story beats — dazed innocents freak out at holding back-to-back funerals, try prognosticating the order of their deaths to come, risk suffering pantophobia as they side-eye their surroundings and dread which random place and thing will spell their doom here in the world’s unfairest game of Clue. Once again characters travel to the worst possible places for safety (a hospital? With all that machinery covered in warning signs?) and think they can outplay Death like they’re the knight in The Seventh Seal, little realizing Death has mastered this game for millennia and has contingency plans on top of its contingency plans, including new ideas more fiendish than the same old speeding trucks coming out of nowhere. (In one sequence Death is an intangible gamer playing through a stealth level, sometimes pausing its potentially noisy micro-manipulations as its next target keeps turning music on and off.)

Lipovsky amd Stein collaborate with three screenwriters — Spider-Man trilogy helmsman Jon Watts, Guy Busick (Abigail, the last two Screams), and Lori Evans Taylor (MyNetWorkTV’s Wicked Wicked Games) — and balance the usual gloom with a deliriously wicked sense of black humor. Extreme Looney Tunes gags are nothing new to Destination fugitives, but what’s most surprising is how often Our Heroes don’t die as they tiptoe ’round red herrings, last-second near-misses, and so many unwitting Hail Marys. Sometimes you can feel the Grim Reaper’s fury at being confounded by those meddling kids, and sometimes it scoffs at more bloodthirsty watchers like, “Does this bug you? I’m not killing them. Does this bug you?” The interplay particularly sparks around Richard Harmon (The 100, The Flash) as the tattooed ‘n’ pierced cousin Erik, a blase skeptic who never lets up from refreshingly cocky know-it-all mode even after he finally accepts the situation’s severity. I hadn’t expected FD6 (FDB?) to be the series’ funniest entry to date, but here we are. In hindsight it’s also cool how the shrewdly edited teaser and trailer don’t spoil nearly as much as you’d think.

Such movie magic comes with a price, though: the dark mirth heightens the suspense so it hurts a bit worse whenever Death scores a direct hit on the more interesting characters and lets the whinier ones persist. The most solemn exchanges come off stale and clunky at times, especially the family melodrama, possibly because they were less fun to write and perform than the inspired comedy bits. The laborious focus on a tired “family above all” Moral of the Story also leaves no room for any new navel-gazing toward the inherent free-will/destiny conflict, which the other sequels likewise shafted in their shallow pursuits of The Most Epic Kills Ever. I know, that’s this entire series’ real reason to exist, but it’s not quite my craving. To their credit, the popcorn bloodbath is more skillfully executed than ever, clearly aided by a larger VFX budget than the other films, for what that’s worth. (It’d definitely leaps and bounds beyond the fourth Destination‘s auto-racing opener, which looks utterly rubbish on YouTube, more primitive than mid-2000s Doctor Who.)

So it’s fair to call Final Destination Bloodlines a “return to form” after the 14-year hiatus that its weaksauce predecessors precipitated. Not only do Lipovsky amd Stein raise expectations for whatever might come next, they’ve also broadened the possibilities in the same way that Prey did for Predator: future sequels can avoid the present and romp around other eras, back when it was even easier for your own stuff to kill you. Just imagine: six teens ditch their Hindenburg tickets! Six teens skip their World Trade Center field trip! Six girls beg off their night shifts at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory! The possibilities are endless and potentially tasteless if they choose unwisely…but then, what if it’s destined to flop again next time?

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Other members of the central family include Teo Briones (kid brother of The Pitt‘s Isa Briones), Anna Lore (Gotham Knights, Doom Patrol), and Rya Kihlstedt (Superman & Lois, Obi-Wan Kenobi) as Stefani’s long-lost deadbeat mom. Max Lloyd-Jones, an X-Wing pilot in The Mandalorian‘s world, is young Iris’ date in the prologue.

Special mention must be made of the best scene in the movie: a farewell performance from the series’ best and longest-lived player, the late Tony Todd, who passed away last November 6th. He’d already been diagnosed with stomach cancer when he shot his final scene in his final film several months earlier and…well, he uses that. He reprises creepy coroner William Bludworth one last time looking as gaunt as a scarecrow, a wisp of the gentleman giant we once met fourteen years ago. But his performance is as powerful as it ever was, as he digresses from his usual Destination cameo spookiness with parting words that aren’t meant to unsettle the rattled ensemble standing in front of him. Rather, as written by Todd himself, his short speech is a brave reminder to viewers and fans to make the most of life while we still can before Death turns its traps our way.

(They also give Bludworth an unnecessary secret origin, but maybe that’s the best parting gift they could’ve given him under the circumstances.)

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Final Destination Bloodlines end credits, though the animated main section entertains as it follows alongside the film’s smallest, deadliest object rolling around and through a newspaper archive of group tragedies — some seen in the films, some as yet unrealized and possibly taken from the producers’ brainstorming wish-list that haven’t been used…yet.

Before moving onward into the finer print, one last message towers above all else:

“IN MEMORY OF TONY TODD.”