The madness and inbred scares ensue for Declan O’Brien’s return to the ‘Wrong Turn’ franchise with horror prequel ‘Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings’. Some 8 years after the Rob Schmidt helmed original, starring Eliza Dushku and ‘Dexter’s Desmond Harrington, we are finally able to learn of the origins and past of the now legendary trio of inbred maniacs Three Finger, Saw Tooth and One Eye.
For this fourth installment O’Brien switches the action and takes us back to where it all began as we learn of the roots of where this perverse family dynamic originated. This, in the movie, is featured mainly during its initial setup which introduces us to the Glensville Sanatorium, Virginia back in 1974 where we witness the horrors of a mass patient escape within the hospital. The escape and subsequent running amok by the crazed patients is all started by the terrifyingly twisted threesome who have their blood thirsty fun with the doctors and orderly’s within.
As back-story’s go it is a fairly lackluster ordeal and shamefully undeveloped. It’s more a framing tool in order to skip ahead to the oft told tale of a bunch of teenagers that will haplessly get plucked off one by one by the group of manic antagonists. The rest of the action does little to remove itself from the interior of the now-abandoned asylum which all the time feels a little unusual for a ‘Wrong Turn’ film where previous chapters have taken place in the great outdoors.
There’s plenty of gore as one would expect from this type of movie however it falls into the trap that many films in this sub-genre always seem to do over and over again. It feels the death sequences are the highlights and all the on-screen effort appears to go into them but completely forgets that the processes and direction that leads you there in the first place is the key to keeping an audience interested. Even a hardened gore-hound still wants to feel like he’s on the ride and not phasing out in between the arrival of the more elaborate sequences.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Having just landed on DVD here in the UK and with the recent wrap for ‘Wrong Turn 5’ (also to be directed by Declan O’Brien) the hillbilly horror series is far from over. ‘Wrong Turn 4’ offers us some insight into the origins of the psychotic hillbilly’s we’ve all come to love over the years but perhaps could have developed the story even further and maybe this is something we can look forward to in the next installment. There’s an awful lack of stability within the script and this sadly causes an unfavoured proportion of this movie to become throwaway more than useful narrative.
