Death comes out of the retirement it has enjoyed since killing all those celebrities in 2016 for another Final Destination movie, a prospect the world needed like a stray tyre to the head.

Final Destination Bloodlines starts out like it is looking to do something different, with the trademark opening premonition actually set in the 1960s – a pleasant change from previous instalments whose only reference to the past have been their racial politics. But this retrofuturist vision turns out to be a dream that modern-day college student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is having of a premonition that her grandmother Iris (Gabrielle Rose) had in 1968.

Stefani tracks down Iris, who has cancer, and has grown so fearful of being killed that she has surrounded her house with deathtraps like a septuagenarian Sarah Connor (if Sarah Connor had decided to move in with a family of Terminators). Stefani explains that she is dreaming her premonition, which Iris immediately accepts (“Maybe my cancer passed my premonition onto you.”) and launches into the exciting exposition every Final Destination fan has been waiting for.

An hour later, their family members start dying in a variety of forgettable ways, because death has spent the last 60 years killing the descendants of the people from Iris’s original vision – another refreshing twist that means we get boring family drama instead of boring relationship drama. And Iris knew this would happen but decides to trigger her family’s demise anyway, making the last 60 years of her life as pointless as the last three Final Destination movies.

As usual there are a couple of decent kills, but none of the playful editing that makes you wonder which part of a sequence is going to deliver the final blow, nothing in the way of satire, and lots of bad CGI that ruins any of their gory impact. And the talky bits in between the kills are more torturous than any of death’s contraptions, giving Bloodlines the 110-minute bloat of an abandoned corpse.

So what looked like it might be trying something new turns out to offer nothing entertaining, and a film that only really had to deliver some elaborate kills in order to justify its existence ends up about as fun as watching something die in its sleep. I won’t spoil the late Tony Todd’s involvement, but it’s nice to know the only way to escape a Final Destination film with any dignity is to be dead before it starts.