A blender. A lawn mower. A ceiling fan. A garden rake. A vending machine. An MRI scanner.
These mundane items are supposed to ease us through life, helping us eat, clean, keep cool, stay healthy. They’re not supposed to be evil.
But in Final Destination Bloodlines, as in the entire 25-year franchise, ordinary objects become fearsome tools of murderous mayhem. And they do it through intricate sequences akin to Rube Goldberg machines — those contraptions that make simple tasks complex through elaborate chain reactions. We doubt Goldberg intended for a nose ring to interact with a ceiling fan in quite the way seen here, but whatever.
Photo: AP
There’s some ingenious chaos cooked up here by co-directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, who said at the film’s premiere this week that they hope people will be watching this, the franchise’s sixth installment (and 14 years after the last), through their fingers — but with smiles on their faces.
To which I must confess I muttered to myself: “No way I’m going to be smiling.” I braced to feel jumpy and miserable for two hours.
But sure enough I was soon smiling, even giggling. Turns out, horror films are a lot easier to handle when they’re funny. Even more so when they’re witty. A spoonful of wit, as Mary Poppins might say, helps the bloody mayhem go down.
Photo: AP
Part of the fun in these movies is that we all know what we know. The surprise is not whether people will die. Death is not to be cheated. The issue is HOW, and that’s where creativity comes in.
The action starts with probably the most impressive sequence in the movie — an opening scene set in 1969 at the so-called Skyview tower, looking very much like the Space Needle (but filmed in Vancouver). It’s opening night at the luxurious restaurant up top.
Lovely young Iris (Brec Bassinger) is brought here by her beau for a romantic evening and, though she doesn’t know it, a proposal. In the elevator, Iris tries to calm her nerves. It doesn’t help when the elevator guy boasts the project was completed months ahead of schedule.
Photo: AP
Once upstairs, Iris’ nerves persist, but she tries to quell them. When she nicks her finger and a bit of blood seeps out, she says with a smile, “I’ll live.”
Ha!
Soon enough, rivets are popping and the place is crumbling. Then people start dropping dead on the ground, to the befuddlement of parking valets listening to Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head — written in 1969! — one of many musical jokes here.
And then a present-day college student wakes up.
Turns out this has all been a recurring nightmare of Stefani, who’s in danger of flunking out because all she can think of is Skyview. Her sleep-deprived roommate urges her to go home and figure things out.
Which Stefani (an appealing Kaitlyn Santa Juana) does, determined to learn who Iris is. Turns out the woman is her grandmother. Uncle Howard tells her to stay away from the madwoman who years ago lost custody of her children.
Stefani suspects there’s more to it. She tracks Iris down in the remote cabin where the reclusive woman has spent decades. She learns that Iris indeed survived a Skyview calamity — but thanks to her premonition, she actually saved many lives.
There’s a catch, though. Every person who survived — thanks to Iris — ended up dying later. That’s because they cheated Death, and became marked men and women. Their offspring are marked too — hence the movie’s title — because they were never supposed to exist. “Death is coming for our family,” Iris warns.
What does this mean for Stefani? It means she has to save everyone. And that everyday life becomes very dangerous.
A family barbecue starts off happily, but then we see the spiked rake lodged just under the trampoline, and the huge glass shard in the blender. Someone will die. But who, and how?
And that’s how the movie continues, upping the ante with each kill. A tattoo parlor hosts one of the more creative Goldberg-ian catastrophes. Even wilder is a scene with an MRI scanner. You know that giant magnet? Yeah, that.
Just as important are the non-deaths — the times you’re sure something terrible will happen, but it doesn’t. I found this silly phrase scrawled later on my notepad: “Actually he doesn’t die.”
Some people hate horror films of any kind. They’re not the intended audience here. But for those who don’t, or are mixed, it’s true: You may watch Final Destination Bloodlines through fingers covering your face. But chances are high you’ll be smiling, too.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS