WRONG TURN 5

The WRONG TURN series is kind of baffling I have to say. Whereas a lot of franchises start off with a genre classic before slowly degenerating (Hellraiser, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm St etc), the WRONG TURN chain started off mediocre and didn’t get much better. WRONG TURN 3: Left for Dead for example was a particularly deplorable effort in which the only memorable slaughtering was Tamer Hassan’s attempt at an American accent. The fourth instalment, BLOODY BEGINNINGS fared a bit better as at least the sex and gore content was cranked up to 11. S0 here we are then, a decade after the original, with the DVD release of WRONG TURN 5: Bloodlines.

Set in Fairlake Virginia, the locals are all getting ready to attend the Mountain Man Music Festival. It is alleged the festivals title have been derived from an unsavoury incident in 1817 when on Halloween night (when else?) a conflict between the local miners and the indigenous ‘Hill People’ resulted in the entire town being ravaged, barbequed and eaten by the latter group.

Three facially disfigured descendants from the malicious interbred bloodline are One Eye, Saw Tooth and Three Finger who, due to having their hospital hideout destroyed in a previous WT episode, are now assistants to an odious individual called Maynard (Doug Bradley). They are the perfect match it would seem with Maynard boasting of having 30 years in the serial killing business.

The narrative is focused on 5 college students. We have Billy (Simon Ginty), who has actually dropped out of college but insists he will soon be an entrepreneur; His cute blonde girlfriend is Cruz (Amy Lennox) who is friends with the even more delectable Lita (Roxanne McKee); Lita’s partner, who has been blessed with brawn, is Gus (Paul Luebke), while completing the fated five is Julian (Oliver Hoare).

The young quintet set off with a change of clothes and a bulging bag of hallucinogenic pharmaceuticals consisting of shrooms, pills and weed. But before they can get indulge in any zonked out revelries, a ‘sharp swerve’ as oppose to a ‘wrong turn’ plunges their car into a tree. The reason for such sudden evasive action is a careless pedestrian meandering across the country road – a pedestrian named Maynard!

When the group’s retaliation to being attacked by the seemingly injured Maynard is witnessed by the local sheriff, Angela Carter (Camilla Arfweson), they find themselves incarcerated for the night.

But a wrecked car and missing the Mountain Man Festival is the last of their worries. Maynard’s 3 ‘boys’ are seeking to break their leader free... and cause as much carnage while doing it!

OK I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that anyone who enjoys, or at least tolerates, the WRONG TURN movies are not exactly bothered about the level of sophistication therein! Take Sheriff Carters’ distress call midway through WT5 for example: "The town is under siege by three crazed hillbillies..!" If that doesn’t exemplify the ridiculousness of these movies I don’t know what will!

Personally I am willing to do a deal: I’ll forgive the lack of plot intricacies and any notion of plausibility if I get a creative and copious amount of blood, guts and gore!

With that in mind, how does the movie fare? I was a little concerned early on when we had a personal bug bear of mine, the prank sequence. I hate those! Its like you see the axe’s shadow mid-air ready to disembowel a couple making love and then BOOM; Masks are removed to the tune of "Hey it’s only us!" It’s akin to having a sneeze wedged at the top of your nostrils that frustratingly creeps back in! When the gore did actually start I was also a little perturbed. A couple of ears getting lopped off were clearly produced by means of equally annoying CGI. But after that, when the brutal floodgates did open, prosthetics and gallons of red liquid were productively employed to deliver the goods.

Fingers and hands are chopped off; craniums are stabbed; stomachs are reduced to pulp via an axe; intestines are force fed back to their owner; victims are electrocuted and burned while shins are reshaped by an excruciating bludgeoning. But best of all was the two for the price of one murder featuring a football field and a driven industrial grade lawnmower. Pure over the top splatter nonsense that had me off my seat!!!

Why was a ‘soccer pitch’ used in the aforementioned gory highlight? Who knows? Maybe it was to make a certain Doug Bradley feel more at home. So what of the articulate legend? He actually spends most of the movie behind bars in the Sheriffs office but it does at least give him a platform to deliver an almost ‘Hannibal Lecter’ type performance. It’s worth also mentioning that he appears to have swapped prosthetic makeup for a potty mouth in this one. Goodness me, its "…I’ll kill you bitch…" this and "…I’ll cut off your titties…" that. I have to admit I am a little biased when it comes to Mr Bradley. He could fart in a paper bag while making raspberry noises and it would sound like Shakespeare to me, but even so, his deliberate and confidently delivered threats while incarcerated still made for engaging viewing.

The disc itself is of an exceptional standard. The quality of the 1.78:1 presentation was razor sharp throughout and even in the dimly lit sequences in the second half of the movie (due to a power cut in the story) well defined colours and tones were stunning. I can’t imagine there are too many DVD’s out there that can hold a candle to the visual supremacy of this baby.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio also upheld these standards of excellence. The ominous but softly spoken dialogue from Maynard was crystal clear while the plentiful violent set pieces were emphasized by some lucid bone crunching and squelches that rose above the soundtrack and screams. Thuds were meaty and the odd explosion positively rumbled. Highly impressive stuff especially when on top of all this, joy of all joys, the BBFC have passed the movie fully UNCUT!!!

The disc’s MAIN MENU has four options. PLAY MOVIE, SETUP (where you can choose the Dolby Soundtrack or Declan O’Brien’s Audio Commentary), SCENES (divided up into 24 segments) and then an EXTRAS chapter. The bonus material consists of the Audio Commentary (the same that can be accessed in the SETUP menu) and 3 behind the scenes skits: A Day in Death, Hillbilly Kills and Director’s Die-aries all lasting around 7 minutes each.

WRONG TURN movies should be the sort of fodder I hate. A sickeningly attractive cast, nonsensical scenarios literally riddled with holes such as where did the carnival revellers disappear to?; How was Maynard so easy coerced into a cell by a lone female?; Why the fuck did the writers think it be clever and funny to have Bradley refer to his minions as ‘pinheads’?!?!? Etc, etc.

But if you want healthy budgeted splatter that looks and sounds amazing, look no further. Guess I’ll see you all in the near future, same time same place for part 6!

Review by Marc Lissenburg