Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) & Novocaine (2025)
Accidents may happen, and death is pretty much inevitable, but predictability is the real killer in Final Destination: Bloodlines, which starts off strong, but ends more or less in the way you can expect from an FD-movie.
Which doesn’t mean it’s bad - I give it three stars - but even if you tinker with the formula a little bit the net result of having as many cast members killed in ways that are both gruesome and (depending on your taste ) hilarious, well, mileage may vary, but not all that much.
Still, the first twenty minutes are amazing. It’s basically a short film, that can totally stand on its own. It takes place in 1969 in the brand new Sky View tower, a magnificent construction that draws immediate comparisons to other magnificent constructions, like, for instance, the Titanic.
It’s the place where young Iris Campbell (a delightful role by Brec Bassinger) is taken to on opening night by her dapper boyfriend Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones), who has pulled some strings to gain entrance to such an exclusive spot.
But even though the evening doesn’t go exactly as planned, it looks like it’s a success, when he not only proposes and she accepts, but she also has a little surprise in store for him, which will make their married life even more complete before it’s even begun.
A lot of time, money and attention to period detail has gone into this sequence, and it’s so good it’s (almost) worth the price of admission alone.
It ends with Iris’ granddaughter Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) waking up from a bad dream some fifty years later.
It’s a nightmare she’s been having for months, and now lack of proper sleep is seriously threatening to derail her college studies.
On the advice of her roommate, who would also for once like to get some sleep, she goes back home to find some answers. And this is the point when the movie becomes Final Destination: Bloodlines.
I won’t spoil too much, but I’ll give you some clues. There are family members that get picked off one by one. There are lawn mowers, garbage trucks and medical contraptions. And of course there are plenty of severed and splattered heads.
As the movie’s designated Final Girl, Stefani is our way in to sympathize with the other characters, but both her visions and her emoting aren’t enough to change the inevitable.
Dearly departed Tony Todd is there in his final appearance as Dr. William Bludworth to remind us that ‘life is precious’ although I think that in the context of this franchise he could have added the words ‘for what that’s worth’.
Like the Scream movies (which I mostly adore because it gives its characters a fighting chance to survive) and the Smile movies (which I greatly respect for taking its mental health issues seriously even though the suicides are as inevitable as the accidental deaths in Final Destination), this franchise offers up decent horror entertainment for mainstream audiences, without holding back from the violence that stems from our deepest, darkest fears (both rational and irrational) that have to with the cruelty of fate and the accidents that may or may not happen in everyday life.
Bloodlines is the sixth Final Destination movie in all, but the first one in fourteen years and as there is bound to be a lot of multi generational interest, it will be fun to see how well it does in theaters.
Written by Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor and Jon Watts, and directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, it mostly feels like a job well done, even I would have preferred that the movie had retained the high quality of those first twenty minutes.
Note: Final Destination: Bloodlines is released this week in most countries.
NOVOCAINE (Dan Berk & Robert Olsen, 2025)
Novocaine is a pretty decent action thriller, about a man who can’t feel pain, with starring roles for Jack Quaid and Amber Midthunder, whose chemistry adds a lot of heart to the romantic comedy subplot.
Written by Lars Jacobson and directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, there are two things you need to know about Nate (Quaid). One: He is a nice, inoffensive guy who works as an assistant manager for a bank in San Diego. Two: he can’t feel physical pain.
Great, you might think, but not really. If you can’t feel pain you can bite your tongue off eating solid foods. Also your bladder may explode if you forget to set a time to go to the bathroom. There are basically a thousand ways to kill yourself if you’re not careful, but fortunately this is not about a movie about.
Nate is madly in love with Sherry (Midthunder), who works as a teller for the same bank, but he is too shy to ask her out. So to his surprise she asks him, and what follows is maybe the best night of his life.
Quaid and Midthunder share great chemistry together and as a romantic comedy Novocaine could have worked just fine.
But as an action comedy is works just as well, as the next morning the bank is robbed and Sherry is taken hostage. And now Nate’s super power comes in handy, as he morphs into a one man army, chasing the bad guys (led by Ray Nicholson), while being pursued himself by the cops (led by Betty Gabriel), who think he’s involved, and only getting help from a friend (Jacob Batalon) he only knows from playing online games together.
In the end the movie is basically an excuse for a series of increasingly more bizarre action scenes in which he uses the inability to feel pain to his advantage. It doesn’t mean he can’t be hurt or killed. It just means that along the way he gets beaten, bruised and burnt (to a crisp) but is able to carry on as the trooper he is. And as the bad guys can feel pain, they get what’s coming too them.
Novocaine is both funny and extremely violent, a one-joke movie that’s successfully carried over the finish line by the romantic link between the two appealing leads.
It’s not anything more than that, but if that’s what you like, you’re probably going to enjoy it as much as I did.
I give it 7 1/2 out of ten!
Note: After being released theatrically earlier in the year, Novocaine is now available on streaming in most countries - or else it soon will be.