If every terrible feeling you ever had — every lurch in your stomach during a bit of plane turbulence, every sinking feeling on a subway train that’s going just a little too fast, every tightening of your chest when driving behind a huge semi truck — always came spectacularly, horrifyingly true, you might be in a “Final Destination” movie.
The first film in the franchise, directed by James Wong, was expanded from an unproduced spec script for an episode of “The X-Files” written by Jeffrey Reddick. It follows a group of teenagers who, after avoiding a fatal plane crash on a school trip because one of their classmates has a premonition of the disaster, discover that Death won’t let its plans be foiled so easily. That film has since spurred five others, all known for the Rube Goldberg-esque kill sequences that occur when Death returns to claim its victims in increasingly bizarre accidents.
With the latest film, “Final Destination: Bloodlines” (directed by Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky), now in theaters, we have a premonition of what you can expect to see in any given “Final Destination” movie. You might even say we’ve seen it all before.