WRONG TURN 3: LEFT FOR DEAD

WRONG TURN 3: LEFT FOR DEAD

Trey (Jack Gordon), his girlfriend Alex (Janet Montgomery) and another couple enjoy some free time canoeing down the rocky rivers of the American "outback", in opening scenes that are not dissimilar to an updated take on the quieter moments of DELIVERANCE.

Afterwards, Alex's sunbathing is cut short when she witnesses their two friends being butchered mercilessly at the hands of mutant cannibal Three Finger (Borislav Iliev).

The action then cuts to the tough-as-nails West Virginia Grafton Penitentiary, where we meet Chavez (Tamer Hassan) and Floyd (Gil Kolirin), two rock-hard inmates who apparently have it in for each other. But a tenuous agreement is made between the pair of them, concerning their impending transfer to another prison - and the fact that neither of them intend to arrive there.

Unbeknown to them, the wardens have employed Willy (Christian Contreras) to go undercover as a fellow inmate, and Marshall Davis (Vlado Mihailov), to oversee Chavez's transfer - he's considered to be a particularly wild card, after all. Baffled hero Nate (Tom Frederic) is given the task of presiding over the whole affair.

And so, the prison bus sets off on an unfeasibly lonely route across the backwoods of America, with several violent prisoners just itching to escape at the earliest opportunity. Several of them appear to be of British persuasion too, which is odd (but presumably based on casting the cheapest wares available).

How does this tie in with the gory prologue? Well, the prison bus stops by a motorway cafe and tight-arsed Sherriff Carver (Bill Moody) is told of the unfortunate disappearance of four kids in the area. They were rafting in the Bluefish River area, just recently ...

So, the bus takes a detour there to investigate the occurrence - and is promptly run off the road (and indeed the edge of a small hill) by the inbred Three Finger in his pilfered towing truck.

Chavez attempts to take control of the situation when the panicked convicts and screws emerge from the bus, in the pitch black and in the middle of nowhere, but none of them had accounted for their cannibalistic tormentors lurking in the shadows.

Eventually, the survivors meet Alex and an unlikely alliance is formed as she begins to tell them what they're dealing with ...

Rob Schmidt's WRONG TURN was released in 2003 to a baffling amount of critical acclaim. It trod no new ground and pussyfooted around the elements it purported to deliver for horror fans: where were the gore and trash? It was, ultimately, yet another slick and shallow contemporary studio picture looking to put bums on seats with the fake promise of harking back to the aesthetics of grimy, dangerous 70s horror films.

And yet the film proved successful enough to spawn the 2007 sequel WRONG TURN 2: DEAD END. The irony of this being that the sequel was actually a lot of fun, heaping on the gore in almost comedic quantities - hopefully alienating the latter-day fan boys who misread the first instalment as "classic grindhouse horror" - and even throwing a rousingly boisterous turn in from one Henry Rollins.

WRONG TURN 2 should have been shit. After all, its progenitor was. But director Joe Lynch, who cut his teeth working on several aspects of the production for Troma's ludicrously fun TERROR FIRMER, turned the sequel into a breathless, entertaining and unapologetically brain-dead exercise in tub-thumping gore action.

The big question then is: Should the series have continued any further, or ended on that dubious high?

Well, for a start it's seriously lacking in the cast department because all of these bozos are attractive but faceless, forgettable fools who don't share one iota of charisma or personality between them. For all his theatrics, Rollins is sorely missed this time around as there's no-one to cheer on when the going gets tough. Hassan (THE BUSINESS; THE FERRYMAN) is the closest we get to a character of interest, but even he can't rise above Connor James Delaney's derivative and often clunky script.

So perhaps the gore is on a par with part 2? Nope. Although there are admittedly gruesome moments (a body being chopped into thirds; vicious stabbings to faces; limbs - and even a head - lopped off), there is an unfortunate tendency for the filmmakers to rely on clumsy CGI. Admittedly this is most intrusive during non-gore sequences such as when characters are "driving" along the desert (or, in front of an extremely obvious blue screen ...). Either way, the FX do scream "cruddy cheap straight-to-video horror film". Which, of course, is precisely what this is.

Pacing is fair and editing is tight, both of which work in the film's favour. And I'll also gladly concede that Lorenzo Senatore's cinematography is highly attractive (he seems to have a penchant for working on sequels though: he also acted as DoP on RETURN TO HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, STARSHIP TROOPERS 3: MARAUDER, LAKE PLACID 2, MESSENGERS 2: THE SCARECROW, BOOGEYMAN 3 ...).

The film is presented in a highly desirable anamorphic 1.78:1 transfer on 20th Century Fox's disc. Images remain sharp, clean, clear and bright throughout, in what is an understandably great visual presentation: who would expect anything less of a new film released on a major label?

5.1 audio is presented in original English along with a curiously well-rendered French-dubbed track. Both sound evenly balanced and sufficiently meaty. Optional subtitles are available in English for the Hard of Hearing, French, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish.

An animated main menu page leads into a static scene-selection menu allowing access to the film via 16 chapters.

Extras are instigated by the cringily titled "Wrong Turn 3 In 3 Fingers ... I Mean, Parts". You guessed it; it's a 3-part documentary with featurettes covering the FX, the aims of the film and the character motivations of the actors. It's all quite fluffy stuff, but at least it's well presented in a slick, MTV style. Some behind-the-scenes footage makes it almost worthwhile. Consisting of three featurettes - "Action, Gore & Chaos!", "Brothers In Blood" and "Three Finger's Fright Night" - this has it's own sub-menu allowing you to watch each segment individually or as an 18-minute whole.

1 minute and 20 seconds of timecoded deleted scenes follow (2 in total), which look good enough but add nothing of consequence to the overall package.

The disc is defaulted to open with a shameless 2-minute advertisement for Fox's current range of Blu-ray titles.

The film is also available as part of a trilogy boxset over here, or on "unrated" Blu-ray in America (the same version of the film that's offered here, I believe). Be warned though, if you're tempted to go the BD route: the US disc is Region A encoded.

Passable in a strictly throwaway sense, WRONG TURN 3: LEFT FOR DEAD is a disappointing addition to an already dubious franchise - and a film that will fall short of seasoned horror fans' expectancies.

Review by Stuart Willis


 
Released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Region 2 - PAL
Rated 18
Extras :
see main review
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