Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)

But before that the business. We've got a three way battle for musical episode going on right now. The contenders American Pop, Little Chomp of Horrors and The Singing Detective that is the seven hour British mini series. I encourage you to vote for hoping that it would make frequent collaborator HP tremble, and it did. He does not want to do the Singing Detective. I would encourage you to vote for it more, but things are looking grim for two of our entries. One is pulled way ahead. It's

obviously Little Shop of Horror. It's obvious we've all seen it, and it's obvious we all love it, or do we? Voting is still open. Hell, it's not too late to throw in another contender. If you're so inclined. Let me know at Father Malone on the socials. That's where you're most likely to find me. But don't forget Father Malone seven to one at gmail dot com For everything else or something else I don't know, hit me up vote for a musical, tell me I'm wrong about something, request

a future film. Go there links in description. That's what the podcasters say. And now a returning segment because it

was so much fun. Last week, in honor of Vangoria Magazine's Terror Teletype, their column regaling you with upcoming releases, we present once again the Frightening Facts Machine. I'm well documented at this point with my feelings about nostalgia. I fucking hate it, at least the preponderance of it. I look back on my life with plenty of fond memories. Who doesn't, And there are times when our past seems

way more palatable than our present. But the way some people armor themselves with the iconography of their youth is just a little square, little sad, which is nothing to say for the nostalgia industry that's sprung up over the past thirty years. When I was a kid, to get a piece of merchandise from a film you loved was nigh impossible. Obviously, if Star Wars was your thing, you

were golden. In fact, anything that came out geared toward kids was going to have some level of toy or t shirt or memento that you could hold in your hot little hands. No one could claim Johns was for kids. But I had a board game that featured a giant plastic shark with a hinged jaw connected by rubber bands. You'd have to take things out of his mouth, like a wagon wheel and hope it didn't snap shut. That was officially licensed. But where was my action figure of

Captain Blake, the murderous ghost from John Carpenter's The Fog. Well, he's standing on my microphone right now, because at some point someone figured out that we were all denied our idiosyncratic goodies, and there's a lot of money to be made in that regard. Yes, I am guilty of trafficking in a mild form of nostalgia, but I don't want to live back then. Right now is the best time and always has been. Yes, even in this fucked up

time line. Everybody, I bring up nostalgia because I couldn't help but feel the way I did it five years old, standing outside a theater in Danvers, Massachusetts, staring at a giant s emblazoned on a movie poster for a cinematic experience that was about to blow my young mind. Of course, we're talking about Superman. James Gunn's Superman, the Savior of the DC Universe, maybe the Savior of a Warner Brothers pictures.

Certainly feels that way. Seems like once upon a time, a movie that had gone wildly over budget and out of control was the only one that could make or break a studio. We miss you, United Artists. That movie Heaven's Gate by Michael Chimino, the one that destroyed United Artists. It is a terrible film. There's been a reevaluation of it, and people have convinced themselves otherwise, but they're wrong. It

is not good. It is boring as fuck. Do you know that they built an entire western town and then Chimino said the road wasn't quite wide enough. And when they went to tear down half of the town to rebuild it a few feet back, he told them no, tear down both sides and to move them equidistant. That's the kind of shit that should destroy a studio, not the fucking Man of Steel. Why is so much freighted on our Kryptonian friend, Kyle el moneymen in middle management?

Of course? Okay, you know what, I am nostalgic for the days of Jack Warner and people who gave a shit about movies that understood it was a business. But recognize the value of the show. Boy, You don't have to remind anyone of the opposite anymore. You know, there's a business to this show. Yeah, we all fucking get that. Now. Wouldn't it be great if someone in charge of getting movies made was actually interested in entertaining you? First? I suppose that's what James Gun is. I'm not the biggest

fan of that guy. I think he delivers solid medium entertainment with hints of greatness and humanity here and there, don't get me wrong, although he'll forever be tainted with attempting to have Nicole Pearlman's name taken off of that Guardians of the Galaxy script, that plot, that story, those characters,

and that configuration. Nicole Perlman, the Walkman. That's James gone. Anyway, they should have put him and partner Peter Safford in charge of the whole company, and not just DC, because no matter what moves they're making creatively, they've still got the specter of David zasliv hanging over them, ready to cut a few more corners and shave off another slice of the once great home of James Cagney and Raul

Walls and Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel and fucking Stanley Kubrick. Anyway, Superman. Yes, I got the chills when John william Score kicked up in the latest end final trailer for the flick. Overall, it seems very exciting, not just the action, which looks great, but in the scope and scale of the film. The fact that he's managed to introduce Crypto the super Dog and we're all cool with it is a real achievement. That may be owing to the time we live in

and how acclimated we've become to shared universes. But still, not only Crypto, but there's a green lantern and a Hawk Girl and Metamorpho and a bunch of other characters you've never heard of. That suit has grown on me. I dig that Kingdom come S emblem on the chest. Everyone looks great. Lois actually behaving like a journalist is pretty great, and Gun is reliable when it comes to the intimacy of his characters. He never lets an epic film let the epic overwhelm the other aspects of his films,

and hopefully that will continue here. Couldn't be more excited for Nicholas Holt as Lex Luthor along thin Lex that is just as fierce him as our hero. I'm totally down and I hope this movie does all the business because I want it to do well, but really because I love Warner Brothers and I'm hoping it will survive. But I'd also be curious to see how Gun handles the films going forward. We've never had a decent brainiac and this Superman seems cosmic as fuck, so fingers crossed.

You know what, I don't think we've ever gotten a truly great Superman film. For me, Superman two is as close as you're gonna get, and at the same time that movie is as wonky as hell. We packed a chamber to take with you just in case you feel like removing your superpowers. It can also give them back to you, even after the crystal technology that drives it exploded all over the place and then it can turn the entire room into a superpower removal chamber while protecting

the occupant. Don't even get me started about the Saran rap s. How did that happen? Who thought? You know what, Superman doesn't have enough distinct powers, Let's make him make plaster of Paris copies of himself. What do you think, listeners? Is there a Superman you swear by a lex you love? Hit me up and let me know everything sends Superman to his garbage? There, I said it? What else we got?

The new trailer for Ballerina came out. That's the newest spinoff for the John Wick franchise. This one stars Anna de Armas and Gabriel Byrne in that greasy fucker Darrell from The Walking Dead? What's his name? Hygiene McGee? No, that can't be it. Well, he's in it, I'm sure. What is a quick scene at the beginning is an appearance by John Wick himself, Keanu reeves. The movie seems to have the snappiness of the Wick movies, and it's

got flame throwers always welcome. Here's a film franchise I stopped actually caring about after the first film, but I found that spinoff series The Continental to be a fucking hoot. I think I may have even covered it here on one of the early episodes of The Roundup. So here's helping without the weight of mister Wick and all the various secret societies and agendas and endless enemies, that this will be a good film. Ballerina is out at the end of June. Spike Lee is back with Denzel Washington

their new film Highest to Lowest. Great looking trailer, can't tell you one fucking thing about what the story is. Lots of cop cars bombing around New York subways, guns, money, I don't know what it's about. I don't care. Sign me up elsewhere. Joe Kazinski, director of Top Gun Maverick, is back with Brad Pitt in f One, a film about Formula one racing that I will wait to watch

when I'm at home. I don't care how violently the IMAX speakers are gonna rumble your seat, or how you really need to see it on the big No, I don't. I subscribe to George Carlin's take on NASCAR when it comes to racing movies. Driving around for eight hours in a circle does not impress me. Elsewhere, I think we can conclusively say that the Cohen brother who d all of their crime features is Ethan. God bless you, Ethan.

You've always been my favorite. He's following up his inaugural solo effort, the irreverent crime drama Drive Away Dolls, with another irreverent crime drama, Honey Don't. Both films starred Margaret Qualley, but joining her here are Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, and as a cricket evangelist, Captain America himself, Chris Evans. Both films are co written by Tricia Cook, who just happens to be missus Ethan Cohen and has been his editor

since Labowski. I know they cut their movies under the pseudonym Roderick James, but you know she was doing the actual splicing while they paced around and bounced balls off the floor. Okay, anyway, moving along, boy, everything's a franchise

these days, but the vanguard when it comes to multiplicity in cinema has always been horror. For every James Bond, there's a Freddie and Adjason. For every Rocky, there's a Leatherface and the Pinhead Skywalker family. Please meet Candy Man and Chucky and his lovely bride. Also give Michael Meyers the glad hand while you're at it. Don't mind him shy not mute. We think the explosion of horror franchises came during the slasher boom of the seventies and the

entirety of the nineteen eighties. I named quite a few just now, and with them came the undeniable points of connection. At their heart, a group of young people facing some new life or new challenge are picked off one by one by a killer, masked or otherwise. The killer's motive and modus are irrelevant, but there is a killer, and our protagonists will fight their way through the length of the picture, regardless of how long the span of time passes on screen, till either all of them are dead

or way more likely a soul survivor remains. Any innovation on that formula has been purely in plot or character arcs. Oh, this guy shows up in your dreams, This one's inside a puzzle box and will drag you to hell, doesn't matter. One by one, they hunt and kill our heroes beginning, middle and end, and there wouldn't be any true innovation to the genre until the late nineteen nineties Not So Fast Scream franchise. Pointing out tropes while acting them out

doesn't alter the formula one fucking bit. Now, the true pioneer when it comes to slasher movies started out as a spec script for The X Files. Jeffrey Reddick, the creator of the whole series, was trying to get a TV agent and his favorite show was X Files, so he cooked up a spec script about a recent article he'd read about a woman who'd been warned not to board a plane which later crashed. He never submitted to Chris Carter, convinced the idea merited its own feature, scaling

the adults characters down to high school seniors. But the X Files will not be denied. More specifically, my favorite writers on the show, and actually my favorite television writers of all time, Glenn Morgan and James Wong. They cut their teeth on twenty one Jump Street Show. They were

into Johnny deppu Wie before any of you. They created one of the best ni fi shows of the nineties, Space Above and Beyond, which I've covered in a previous episode if you'd like to check that out, and they shepherded my favorite season of television of All Time season two of Millennium, Chris Carter's sister series two, The X Files. They also made a bunch of movies. Some of them are very very good about half of them, and then there's some middling, and then there's Chun Lee Street Fighter

with Lana Lang from Smallville. Morgan and Wang had come off X Files in Space Above and Beyond a Millennium and another failed pilot for a gangster show that had seven families each based on the Seven Deadly Sins, which sounds fucking amazing, and they were looking to get into features when this script, which originated years prior as an attempt at X files, found its way into their expert

x files hands. They retained the basic setup, jettisoning basically everything else, and injected the entire affair with a sense of melancholy in dread consistent with teenage grief. And while Jeffrey Reddick had Death as an actual figure that speaks and acts and actually kills the teens, it was Morgan and Wong who came up with the first true innovation in slasher films since those idiots decided to go back to the summer camp. They made their villain Death itself invisible,

reinforcing death's inevitability from the get go. You can't fight it if it's not there, And because of that they created the French signature, the Rueb Goldberg Death. Everyday, objects so safe on their own, once put in motion and in tandem, will result in a grisly death for all this, of course, after the major catastrophe that begins each of the films. Let's be honest, that's really how we tell them apart plane crash, logging, truck, roller coaster, NASCAR and

suspension bridge all relatable to varying degrees. I'm not going to see f one, so the likelihood of me going to a NASCAR event are fucking slim to none. But I've been near massive machines so close that they might kill you. And we've all been on planes or on roads with perilous looking cargo trucks. If you find Final Destination two really got under your skin, then the Pacific Northwest is not for you. Or we've all driven over a bridge that gives you vertigo, no matter how far

from the edge your vehicle. So what have they concocted for us this time? In our latest entry? In what is arguably my favorite horror franchise of the past twenty five years, and the first film in the franchise since twenty eleven, fourteen long years. They've done it again. Who can't relate to partying at a supper club on top of a space needle with a glass dance floor in the nineteen sixties. Family, You don't get to pick the one you get, just gotta love the one you got it.

It's beautifully photographed and expertly designed. I loved the actors, but I don't know. Is it Nascar? Bad? Fuck?

pause too. One of those ideas in this film is that the survivor saved everyone, which is like a couple one hundred people, and those people married and had kids. So now it's taken death fifty years to catch up

with its initial survivor and her family. And because the path of destruction is so clearly marked fathered a son to grandson, etc. There's no need for our leads to fumble around looking for clues as to who's next, which is pretty fucking great, But that bumps up against the only good thing about NASCAR, which was that if you eluded death during a disaster, you weren't allowed to die until got to you in its own time and pattern. Mackelty Williams tries to kill himself multiple times and can't.

So how does that jibe with a lineage? Does that mean your kids can't die before you? Maybe it's not contradictory, and it's a possible tributary to explore in future flicks. Nevertheless, there aren't that many rules to this universe, so adherence is key. I can't forgive the Terminator franchise for stating so implicitly that the time machine can only send a living tissue to our present. Then in the next film they sent a liquid metal robot. But this film does

hold up other films precedents. This one's a bit more hopeful than others in that it teases that Kimberly Corman from the logging truck. She continues to live, though how might be a bit slippery in the morality department. We'll see more on that in future films, I'm guessing. Also,

we're given an extended family instead of fellow survivors. Here in fact, none of the characters are involved in the initial catastrophe at all, and there are some reasons to really admire that, particularly with cousin Eric, the tattoo nose ring fellow. You've no doubt spied in the trailer for what happens to that nose ring. That's not a spoiler. It's in the trailer and it's on the poster. His character goes through the only real personal turmoil in the

entire flick. He's great, by the way, played by Richard Harmon, who was weirdly in a Smallville episode about an exploding plane, but also did really great work on the show The Killing, Remember that with Joel Kineman. Love that series, and he's Captain Boomerang and the Arrow Verse. The other great performance in this film, the fucking jewel of a performance comes from Rayah Kilshtett as our leads mom. She is great here.

I had no idea. I was already a fan of hers, but she's the fourth sister in the obi Wan series and Tails from the Empire, and she had a great run on Dexter back in the day The Kills. Like the rest of the film, they're middling. I will say that CGI Gore has gotten really good. There are moments watching people come apart where it all becomes like just so many more pieces of a Rube Goldberg machine, gears, com skulls, femurs. It's very heavy for an old Gorehound

to see some of it done this well. I'm a sucker for practical, but practically can suck just as bad as lame digital effects. Let's be honest. I think bloodlines opens a franchise up to greater possibilities, which is exactly what a sequel ought to be doing. It's doing pretty well, so I hope you get more and we get some folks in there who can make things more relatable. That's

the engine that drives this series. I've never been pulled into a madman's nightmare world, but I have boiled a kettle next to a very sharp knife, much like Kristin Kloak in the plane crash. And that's the thing. The more outlandish kills are warranted in each of the films. You got to top the last one. But enough with the explosions. That's all I'm gonna say. If for no other reason, you should see bloodlines in theaters to honor

the specter that looms over the entire franchise. Death may not make an appearance in any of the movies, but his assistant certainly does. Mister Tony Todd. This is his last big screen role, and he does not disappoint. But you'll be disappointed in yourself if you don't go. What about you, Ripley, How do you rate this flick? Not enough dogs? There were dogs at the barbecue, Not enough of them Okay, hit it, HP, sip J, thank you, HP, call a cab and take the tape of tonight's show

straight to the Museum of Broadcasting. So what is it, little girl? Which destination is final? Which reigns Bloody Supreme, logging truck or roller Coaster? You're fucking right, good girl. Roller Coaster is the best film in the franchise. Shove it. I don't care. I gave the email address and the Insta handle. I like that logging sequence and the crushed flat sequence. Beyond that, I do not care for those characters, and I do not care if they live or die.

Final Destination three, on the other hand, with the return of series originators Glenn Morgan and James Wong, is the high mark of the series. These guys have understood exactly what these movies are from the get go. There's no villain, making it pure thrill ride and why not take that to its logical conclusion with a fucking theme park and a fucking roller coaster and a group of high school

seniors ready to take the horrifying leap into adulthood. Plus, it has the series' strongest lead performance by missus Obi Wan Kenobi Mary Elizabeth Winstead is ew and McGregor a final. This the Nason Touchstone. Love to see him in one of these, not to mention the late Shirley Walker's phenomenal score. And it has the Tanning Beds and those girls you remember them, you remember their type. Ah, the Tanning Beds, Paris Hilton Clones burning Alive to the strains of roller

Coaster of Love by Tommy Lee. What could be better? One of those two actresses, Crystal Lowe, is great here and in another Morgan Wong flick their remake of Black Christmas. She's great there too. I was hoping she'd get to scream Queen's status, but she seems banished to Hallmark Christmas movies these days. Remember those aloof Goth kids They were actually funny. That's Morgan and Wong again. Their dialogue is always sparkling, and it has the fucking roller coaster, which

is a great sequence. And if you go on YouTube you can watch all the behind the scenes shit where they built their own roller coaster, which is also pretty fucking cool. I mean, it would suck if you were one of the actors, but I'm not. What I am is in love with this movie. It is a perfect combination of the first two films. The wit and character depth and emotion from the first matched with a bravura, unhinged approach to kills that they took from the second.

I'm sure you're all burning through the catalog as this new one is released, and I commend you for it. But if you're only gonna watch one again, or if you've never seen any, start at the top final destination three and that's gonna do it for the roundup this week, make sure you tune in Friday. We've got another. Well, honestly, it might be Tales from the Dark Side, it might be thunder Art. I haven't decided.

Ripley Jean, I'm Father Malone. Here's a bit from final Destination, which one.