As the year comes to a close and the whole world comes up with some variations on a personally curated Best of 2025 list, I’m here to say that it’s okay if you haven’t seen every single movie or show on every one of these superlative lists. And it’s okay if your personal best lists contain some outliers, things that fell under the radar this year or weren’t what you’d call a prestige hit.

While I love critical hits like One War After Another and Sinnersfor me, one of the funniest and funniest films of 2025 is the one where — spoiler alert — a man’s face is torn off by a lawnmower and a woman’s head is chopped off inside the compactor of a garbage truck. And I laughed at everything that happened! I have no regrets!

I’m talking, of course, about Final Destination: Bloods. My biggest regret though, is not seeing it in the cinema where an adrenaline-charged audience might have enhanced the experience, but I’m still glad I watched it at home where at least I didn’t have to think to myself about my clammy, sweaty palms.

I ended up watching Final Destination: Bloodlines after it arrived HBO Max (and it will be included in Main Video starting January 1). The sixth installment of the Final Destination franchise (the seventh is in growth) is not only a vehicle for the creative killing of all its characters, it is also a small reward for anyone who has been a fan of the 25-year-old film series, which features subtle nods to previous films and the gruesome deaths they produce.

Why I love Final Destination 6

Kaitlyn Santa Juana stars as Stefani Reyes, a college student who can’t help but watch a deadly skyscraper collapse in 1969, in which her grandmother Iris is one of dozens of people who die. (The whole vision is an elaborate 18-minute Towering Inferno-style disaster scene that’s incredibly entertaining and sets up the entire movie.)

The thing is that Iris, who is now in her 70s, is still alive, although she is a loner who lives alone in a cabin and is convinced that she will die if she leaves her house. Iris has the same visions that Stefani is seeing now in 1969, and the truth is that they were premonitions that helped prevent the fatal collapse of the building, but now Iris is sure that it was because she interrupted Death’s plan. Death slowly claimed everyone inside that building in 1969, along with all their family members who were yet to be born.

Iris is right, and one by one, all of Stefani’s family members start dying in the most creative ways possible. We, the viewers, know what we want in these movies. Any little fear that crosses your mind in real life becomes the worst way to die in a Final Destination film. (An entire generation of movie-goers couldn’t follow behind a logging truck on the highway, I can tell you that.)

The creators of the Final Destination films are masters at taking a kernel of real-life fear and exploiting it or turning it into something more terrifying and clever than you can imagine. In one scene, just when you think a vending machine might fall on top of the person rocking it back and forth, it turns out, there’s another, more unexpected way the machine can kill you. It makes you wish you were in the writers’ room to hear what possible death behavior was left on the cutting floor.

The reason Final Destination: Bloodlines works is that it takes itself seriously. The movie is based on a superstition that you can’t beat Death, and it convincingly makes its case in a way that feels urgent. Many people in the audience believe in fate and superstitions, and this story plays with those beliefs in a smart and clever way. Because the truth is Death is the comes for all of us, but for these particular victims, it’s a detailed, terrifying, often hilarious experience.

As I got older, movies were almost a form of escapism for me. There are certain topics and situations that are too heavy, or don’t make me happy, and I’ve started to avoid them, choosing instead movies that make me feel better in the world. If that means watching someone get impaled on a weathervane or sliced ​​in half by a creaking elevator to do that for you, so be it. When Final Destination 7 is released, I will make sure I go to the theater so I can share the experience with others who feel the same way.