Movie Marathon: 'Wrong Turn 4'
The Wrong Turn series turned out to be a wilder ride than I expected! It went from bland to bananas real fast and we're loving it. With the sub-heading of the next film, we know it's gonna be delightfully dumb.
Movie: Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings
Released: 2011
Director: Declan O'Brien
Cast: Sean Skene, Daniel Skene, Scott Johnson, Jenny Pudavick, Tenika Davis, Kaitlyn Wong, Terra Vnesa, Victor Zinck, Jr., Dean Armstrong
Plot: A group of winter vacationers lost in the West Virginia wilderness and take shelter in an abandoned sanatorium. They have unwillingly stumbled upon the original home to the mutant hill people.
Review: So: prequel. Generally not a fan of the concept, as they tend to add too much importance to random props. Sometimes they go right off the tracks and start making shit up, and that can be entertainingly awful. Bloody Beginnings is firmly in the second category. It's also so completely ridiculous I can't help but watch.
We open in the Glenville Sanatorium during the 70s, where child versions of Saw Tooth, Three Fingers and One Eye from the original movie are held against their will after being found in the woods. After picking the lock of their cell (somehow) they free the lunatics and we get a grotesque sequence of murders. The brothers perform their most horrifying acts thus far here, cooking a visitor with electroshock and ripping a doctor apart with barb wire. This doesn't make sense and adds nothing to the lore.
But it doesn't matter, because five minutes later we're watching a different movie. We're watching a reasonably produced softcore porn movie featuring two couples sharing a room. It's explicit. Five minutes later and we have another movie, this one an 80s teen romp complete with snowmobile montage fun. Then we're in a haunted house. Then it's a party movie. It's completely bananas.
Carrying the movie is a batch of terrible actors putting in their most earnest effort ever. No matter how hard they try they can't do anything with the abysmal writing (although I suspect there's some improv here and there). One character berates another and calls him a pussy for not wanting to split up and search separately, knowing they're being hunted by madmen. After that they agree and all the men go to search for weapons while the women hide out. The black lesbian goes with the men, and the Asian lesbian stays with the women. I'm not sure what that says about the movie.
The movie continues to be tonally all over the place, jumping between full torture and physical comedy. A guy freaks out seeing his girlfriend hanged (although trying to pull her down by her feet...not helping, buddy), and it's a gruesome moment of chaos and terror and gore. Then it ends with him slipping in the blood. Just a bit of physical comedy, why not.
I can't believe I haven't heard about this movie before, because it's pure madness. The terrible performances are hypnotic to watch, and then the torture scenes are convincing enough to be scary. There's an intense moment of the survivors trying to herd the cannibals into a cage, and in the middle of it the editor cuts to a closer shot of one of the busty girls jumping up and down.
This all takes place before the first movie, by the way. Being a prequel doesn't add anything to the movie except the knowledge that these particular mountain men won't be defeated or killed, because they're in the original movie that takes after this. So that sucks.
Out of the whole franchise thus far, this is the most fun. It's completely stupid and packed with unintentional laughs.
Rating: SIX out of TEN (but only as an unintentional comedy, not a horror movie)
