As the sixth film in the Final Destination saga, Bloodlines is smart enough to toy with the material. By now, everybody knows the formula. There’s an opening onslaught of accidental deaths, most brutal, and one character witnessing this premonition will stop death’s Rube Goldberg games. But, wait a minute, this film has the camera pull out to a different character in a different time period! How did this happen? That’s just one of the few intriguing twists that make Bloodlines one of the more engaging entries in a horror franchise in desperate need of this new blood.

Another refreshing change of pace is the likability of the characters being targeted by death. From the opening sequence, we get all the tell-tale signs that a revolving restaurant is about to spin with blood and fire, but also some compassion for the unfortunate Iris (Brec Bassinger), a pregnant woman of the 1960s about to be proposed to by her boyfriend. The film is almost daring you to laugh at the bloody vision she experiences, especially for such over-the-top deaths of getting crushed by pianos. Experiencing the premonition is the college student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), and it seems to keep haunting her dreams. She doesn’t know why this is happening, and neither does the audience, who has become accustomed to the Final Destination formula.

The answer resides in Stefani’s family, comprised of a sordid group of unique characters, from her rebellious cousin Erik (Richard Harmon) to her nomadically estranged mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt). Rather than focusing specifically on a group of friends, Stefani’s family feels uniquely human for being flawed yet empathetic. The family dynamic is interesting on its own, but the presence of unfortunate deaths for the family makes each death a colorful mixture of the pitiful and the hilarious. There’s also a clever formula for how death targets explicitly the family and the strategies used to outsmart the curse of trying to beat the reaper at his game of mortality. By the time Stefani gets the strategy down, we can see all the staging for the first death. So, when that death doesn’t happen, there’s even more mystery. If Stefani’s wrong about the order, what else could she be wrong about? And what other surprises are coming?

This film is refreshingly intelligent. Stefani and her family, though skeptical at first, wise up quickly and start considering all the deaths that might find them at every turn. This makes for a story where you care about this family escaping death’s grip and believe they might have a chance. There are plenty of scenes where they manage to avoid death’s many traps, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose, as though they can sense death wielding the wind for his next kill. This makes for some rather gruesome deaths that are genuinely shocking and tragic.

This type of framing makes sense. Death is not some amateur masked slasher running around with a sharp object. His cunning deserves an assortment of humans more challenging for his tricks than a random batch of mistake-prone teenagers. There’s even some maturity placed in the only returning character of William Bludworth, played one last time by Tony Todd. Having dealt with death for the longest time, Will has the right idea of embracing what little life you have left and exiting this series in the best way.

But, of course, the extra-gory kills still haven’t lost their charm. There are even some neat twists for how the violence unfolds, building the anticipation beautifully for scenes involving garbage trucks, trampolines, vending machines, and an MRI machine. The absurdity is so high that I almost had to stifle my laughter with a sympathetic tear, feeling bad that these characters I loved are doomed to a goofy-ass demise. There’s even some hilarity in the subtle callbacks to other Final Destination films. It’s not just Tony Todd who has a cameo, but the logs from the opening kills in Final Destination 2, and I can’t believe how excited I got to see a cameo of a natural object in these movies.

Bloodlines is the Final Destination movie that makes its characters as thoughtful as the elaborate kills. Plenty of the ooey-gooey brutalizing is expected of the series, but a refreshing jolt of new twists on death’s game to make this unorthodox slasher sequel feature more than just new ways to dice up human bodies. There’s more than just the gimmick of death’s targeting being hereditary and changing time periods to gussy up the saga. It’s a Final Destination film where death once more feels unpredictable and life feels more precious, where the deaths via MRI are so surreal you kinda have to laugh at something so weirdly unfortunate.