Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings (2011)
Directed by Declan O’Brien
Sometimes I wonder how some movies have become franchises, movies like Cabin Fever and Wrong Turn are examples. Wrong Turn (2003) was a fun slasher at a time where the genre was really dying. It came out in a time where the second slasher boom was fading away, and stood out as a good entry. Shorty after the sequels starting coming, and the quality of those dropped rather quickly. I signed up for a Horror Pack, mail package of 4 random horror movies, and I received Wrong Turn 4 in the box. My initial response was “there are 4 of these damn movies?” and then I looked into it and it was getting some favorable reviews from the horror community, so I finally unwrapped this after two years and put it in, let’s go!
Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings is a prequel to the series. We see the inbred backwoods family in an asylum filled with deformed mental patients, because I guess that is a thing. Anyway, the three inbred brothers break out of their cells and incite a riot. The take control of the asylum and live there now. Years go by and the asylum is abandoned with the brothers inside. There is a group of snowmobiles out during a storm, and they get lost. They come across the asylum and go in to take cover from the storm. The group wanders around and finds all sorts of crazy stuff from medical instruments, shock therapy machines and other creepy old stuff. Soon the inbred family returns and they start to pick off each member of the group and eat them. You know like all the other Wrong Turn movies haha.
This movie is all about money shots. From over the top gory kills, to cannibalism, to gratuitous sex scenes, this movie revels in it. When I mean gratuitous sex scene, I mean a sex scene that starts off with a guy in a girl banging for at least a minute, a full-on minute. When you think it is done, the camera pans over to a lesbian couple getting it on. I ended up fast forwarding through it, I wanted to watch a horror movie and not softcore porn. It might be the longest sex scene I’ve seen in a non porn movie, aside from movies like I Spit on Your Grave and its disturbing rape scenes. The kills are what everyone is here for so I get the focus on those. This movie will satiate the hardcore gore hounds. There are so many gory deaths in this so I’ll only mention the ones that come to mind immediately. A doctor gets wire wrapped around his wrists and ankles, attached to mechanical pulleys. The pulleys rip him limb from limb and you see EVERYTHING. A girl gets hung by a barb wire noose, and the idiot boyfriend grabs her feet while she’s being raised to the ceiling. Naturally her head rips off and blood goes everywhere. A guy is filleted by the inbred family while they boil his flesh in oil and eat it, that was really disturbing. A girl gets an auger through the back and out the chest, while blood flies everywhere from the auger bit. One of the dumber ones, one inbred guy puts the track of a snowmobile on a girl’s face and guns the throttle, shredding her face apart. I’ve ridden snowmobiles a lot in my life, living in Michigan almost everyone does. The second he would gun the throttle on her, the snowmobile would take off, yes she would be dug up, especially if the track is spiked, but I really doubt she’d die and it definitely wouldn’t sit in one spot and continuously rip her face off lol.
The acting is what you would expect, it’s rather lame. No one is really that great. Granted the first film didn’t have the greatest acting, Eliza Dushku was fairly decent but outside of that there wasn’t much to mention. That’s how this movie is really, lots of pretty girls, good looking guys and three non-talking cannibals killing them. It isn’t the worst acting I’ve ever seen, and it isn’t distracting like many movies. If anything, the dialogue is worse. There are some truly painful exchanges and the character come off as rather in competent and stupid sometimes. It falls into the trope that slashers of the 2010s always fall into. That trope is where there are no real redeemable characters. Everyone is kind of vapid and sex crazed assholes. All the guys are tools and the girls are a mixture of bimbos and vanity girls. The lesbian couple was a bit much at times, and this was surely written by a younger guy. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other the whole movie. We get it, they’re lesbians, no issues with lesbians here but they’re a normal couple. Normal couples aren’t fucking, dirty talking, and grabbing each other all the time, it’s just not realistic and was obviously some horndog’s dream.
Wrong Turn 4 is flawed for sure, and low budget garbage, no one will argue that, but it is entertaining. It kept my focus and made me cringe a lot with the excessive gore and the scene where they are eating the guy while he’s conscious. I liked the snowy setting and it really became a little tense towards the end. I liked how it ended on a down note, I’ll always appreciate when a slasher does that. This movie is incredibly mean spirited and brutal, so if that is your kind of thing, then by all means give it a shot. I give this movie a C, I didn’t hate it, didn’t love it but I was entertained and that’s all I can ask of this.
