Wrong Turn 4 was released direct to DVD in Australia in May of this year. Upon seeing the series on the shelves at my local store I used the opportunity to justify a mini Wrong Turn marathon, and over the ensuing week or two I watched all four films.
The end result is here, with the one obvious takeaway being that the ‘quality’ of the series dropped dramatically in the last two sequels. Well now less than 6 months later we find Wrong Turn 5 already available.
Will this be a return to the tongue in cheek quality of the first two films, or a continuance of the deteriorating standards of Wrong Turns 3 and 4?
Let’s save time. It’s the latter.
But I’ve watched the damn thing so let’s get to it.
In 1817 the entire population of Fairlake, West Virginia vanished without trace. All that was left were dozens of rubbish bins full of blood-stained wet wipes and thousands of well used giant toothpicks… probably.
Present day Fairlake is equally vacant, at least where braincells are concerned. While the population has returned based upon the evidence in this film it was hardly worth the effort.
Each Halloween a music festival brings young people from far and wide to Fairlake; young people who like to disrobe at the drop of a pants. So what this means for the cannibal redneck family that dwells in the woods outside town for the rest of the year while the town reverts to its snoozy quiet normalcy is anyone’s guess. They must stack the corpses high like squirrels in advance of these quiet times…
This time however the feral deformed trio of teen-munchers has a handler with the power of speech! Though by the time the film ends you might wish this is not the case. It is when this boorish and brash moron is taken into custody that proceedings here (apparently) ‘heat up’.
Among the eager visitors to Fairlake are a carload of the usual interchangeable munchables desperate to be nibbled upon. In between boning each other that is.
Add in a nearly clueless female Sheriff and just like that the scene is set.
Unfortunately this film is even lazier than the most recent two, with the primary differences being that the cannibals don’t appear all that cannibalistic any more, preferring instead elaborate Saw-like set ups that see their victims eviscerated, gutted and gorily ended. Didn’t their new leader not tell them it’s not clever to play with your food? Just eat it for goodness’ sake!
Speaking of the especially talkative head of the clan, his constant cackling grows old real fast, especially as his teasing grows increasingly samey and uninspired. This wouldn’t be as bad if he weren’t available to interject his mindless yap into every second scene in the film.
And while I’m here what of the ‘big festival’? Aside from a brief sequence with maybe thirty extras, there isn’t a scene with more than a couple characters apart from the core ten cops, kids, cannibals. I know this is low budget, but if you can’t afford extras maybe including the ‘music festival with thousands of kids’ gimmick?
Enough about this film. Everyone under 25 has sex then gets eaten. Every cop does half of those things – actually one manages both… and every cannibal snuffles, shuffles and chomps away with precious few repercussions.
I know the filmmakers want to establish the cannibals as Freddy Kreuger, Jason Vorhees type antiheroes but they simply lack the pizzazz and traits required to allow anyone to root for them.
Final Rating – 4.5 / 10. Wrong Turn 5 finds a franchise on autopilot. It is simply awful, as you would expect a cheap rip-off of a copy of a copy of a copy might be.
