In the year 1969, the pregnant Iris Campbell (Gabrielle Rose) and her partner Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones) visit the Skyview Restaurant Tower. He proposes there and they become engaged. But Iris has a premonition of a chain reaction structural failure brought on by overloading that causes the tower to explode and kill everyone.
Years later, her daughter Stefani Reyes (Caitlin Santa Juana) is having nightmares abut the premonition and she begins to ask questions. She meets with her father Marty (Timpo Lee) and her brother Charlie (Teo Briones), her uncle Howard (Alex Zahara), her Aunt Brenda Campbell (April Yelek), and her cousins Erik (Richard Harmon) and Bobby (Owen Patrick Toyner). It seems that Iris subjected Howard and her mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt) to an overprotective upbringing and instilled in them a fear of death.
Darlene suffers from this too and abandoned the Reyes family. Stefani tracks her down to a hidden, fortified cabin in the woods. Iris says that Stefani disrupted Death’s plan to destroy the tower by warning the guests to leave. The tower never collapsed but Death began to take the survivors in the order they would have died, as well as all their descendants, who should never have been born. After Paul died, Iris documented all this in a sketchbook and isolated herself for years in a fortified cabin. Iris has cancer now. She goes outside her fortress to give Stefani the sketchbook and is impaled on a weathervane.
At her funeral, Darlene returns and joins a barbecue. Stefani reads the sketchbook and identifies a person called J.B. who knows about death omens and who has defeated Death. Howard is run over by a lawnmower. There is a fire at Erik’s tattoo parlor but he survives because of his leather clothing. Julia is crushed by a garbage compactor. Obviously, everyone is dying in the order of their birth, though Marty and Brenda are not biologically related and may be spared. Erik was saved because he was conceived by Brenda’s affair with another man and is not in the doomed bloodline.
Darlene visits J.B. at a hospital, who is the creepy William Bludworth (Tony Todd) who has appeared in all the previous Final Destination movies. He was saved from the tower as a child (Jayden Oniah), but he would have been the last to die and spent his life trying to understand Death’s ways. He tells the family they might save themselves by murdering someone and taking their life or committing suicide and being quickly revived. Bludworth has cancer now and will not outlive Iris’s bloodline.
Bobby and the others don’t like those ideas, but Yelik convinces Bobby to eat nuts, to which he is allergic, but both are mangled by a malfunctioning MRI machine. Charlie and Darlene drive to Iris’s cabin in an RV to hide from Death, but the cabin explodes and the RV sinks into the lake and Stefani is trapped in her seat. Darlene is killed by a falling lamp post, but Charlie resuscitates Stefani with CPR. A week later, they are told that she was not actually dead, so the CPR did not actually bring her back from the dead. A train derails, killing Stefani and Charlie.
The Final Destination movies were a great success, despite the fact that the villain, Death, was never actually seen. The movies are loved because of the complex Rube Goldberg death scenes and constant surprises. The series survived, shall we say, six episodes, and now it has come back to life. Tony Todd, who played the most beloved and feared character, was actually dying as he was filmed,. Lori Evans Taylor and Guy Busick wrote most of the script and the film was directed by Zack Lipovsky and Adam Stein. It is a great shocking and creepy success.
In a meeting with executives and producers from New Line Cinema, Lipovsky and Stein staged a freak accident like those in the series and were hired. Tony Todd was quite ill during the filming and died in November 2024. A 71-year-old stuntwoman named Yvette Ferguson came out of retirement to appear and is believed to be the oldest person ever set on fire on camera. The film garnered 92 % on Rotten Tomatoes. In the Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck said the death of Tony Todd was a poignant reminder that death comes for us all. The film is spectacular in its pacing and creativity. It is, of course, shocking and disgusting at times, but is sure to launch a slew (!) of sequels because of its spectacular, over-the-top, darkly funny death scenes..