And so the inexorable string of Wrong Turn sequels rolled ever on. In 2012, the tally of installments bizarrely rose to five when some bright spark figured that the one thing the world needed was yet serving of hillbillies with lop-sided features chopping fuck-happy students into bite-sized chunks. However, I will concede that the last entry, Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginings, was kind of watchable as it shifted the usual franchise tropes into a snowy origin story that saw the three, deformed, Hillicker brothers take over a mountain-bound asylum.
At this point, the series was being guided solely by Declan O’Brien who had written and directed everything from episode 3 onward and as he was allowed to take a third crack at the franchise, he decided to dig even deeper into the history of the series than anyone had ever cared about before – for example, the series managed to bring back Maynard Odets for the first time in year. “Who the fuck is Maynard Odets?” I hear you cry – well, hold on tight, because you’re about find out, whether you actually give a shit or not.
It’s been months since the Hillicker Brothers, Three-Finger, One-Eye and Saw Tooth, left the sanitorium where they grew up and somehow they’ve now ended up living in a shack in the woods with their abusive serial killer father, Maynard Odets. How this has actually occured isn’t something the movie is particularly bothered about explaining, so before we know it we’re hurled into the latest scenario that Wrong Turn has come up with to keep things relatively fresh.
It seems that the city of Fairlake in West Virgina holds an annual music festival known as Mountain Man (sic) where fans flock in fancy dress and generally cause a nuisance to the local law enforcement and five students – Billy, his girlfriend Cruz, Lita, her boyfriend Gus and Julian – are a choice example of this. However, while they laugh and chuckle about how much drugs they have in the car that they’re going to take later, they nearly run down Odets who reacts by attacking them with a knife when they come to check on him, however, while Billy, Gus and Julian retaliate by putting the boot in, Sheriff Angela Carter arrives and arrests Maynard for his stab-happy antics and Billy for the bulging bag barbiturates discovered in the car.
However, once locked up behind bars, the malevolent Maynard starts making wild threats, claiming that “his boys” will come and break him out and sure enough, One-Eye, Saw Tooth and Three-Finger embark on an epic killing spree that’s facilitated by the fact that the majority of the fucking town seems to be deserted because everyone has gone to Mountain Man. Before you know it, it’s the rapidly dwindling Sheriff’s department and a gang of clueless students versus a trio of trained, deformed killers who will stop at nothing to free their vicious patriarch from the clink.
For those a little late to the Wrong Turn party, the franchise had made the decision to switch into prequel territory with the last movie which frankly made a lot of sense seeing as One-Eye and Saw Tooth died in the first film and Three-Finger bought it in part 3; however, seeing as we’d already seen their formative years in the previous flick, there isn’t actually much for the monstrous trio to actually do aside from perform elaborate murder sequences. This is sort of catered for/exasperated by the inclusion of Maynard Odets, the father of the brothers and he really does bring a different energy to the second prequel. For a quick refresher on those who don’t have a clue to who the fuck Maynard Odets is (and I’m pretty sure that’s almost all of you), we first met the character in the first film running a run down gas station and he finally met his end thanks to Henry Rollins and a stick of dynamite when the second movie retconned him into being the head of the family in Wrong Turn 2. However, here we see him in the slightly younger form of Doug Bradley which initially proves to be quite jarring when you remember that he’s already achieved horror icon immortality by playing Pinhead in the Hellraiser franchise. I have to admit, while the rather cruel jibes that Bradley’s obviously used up his Pinhead money tend to write itself, it’s a little weird to watch an actor famous for playing a regal figure renowned for saying such lines as “We’ll tear your soul apart” now play a grotty old man who says things like “I’m gonna cut your titties off as a souvenir.”. Bradley is a consumate professional as always, but paying the bills is also important and I feel a little sad for him as he sneers and chucks cheap threats at the rest of the cast from behind the bars of a cell, but his appearance causes a couple of other issues in the movie.
Up until this point, love them or hate them, the Hillicker Brothers and their various other siblings (who are suspicious by their absence) have been the driving force of the franchise with only feral grunts and Three-Finger’s endless giggling being the sounds they make. Now, with Maynard, they have an actual mouthpiece and even though the brothers score a huge amount of creative kills, his presence somehow shifts the tone from the standard killer hillbilly movie to a serial killer flick and the change isn’t actually that welcome.
For a start, thanks to the film being a prequel, there is no real tension here because we are well aware that all four villains will walk away relatively unscathed, so as a result we are essentially here to watch the entire cast (oddly filled with a lot of alumni from English soap operas) get slaughtered in vastly exaggerated ways once again. However, while the fact that the killers are usually mute mutants kind of keeps thing vaguely fantastical, the fact the we have a vocal ringleader just makes the violence seem far more cruel and nasty than it usual is and not in a good way. Yes, a lot of the poorly written characters played by jobbing actor bite the dust in outlandish ways (getting run over by a snowblower is a noticable one as is someone else having their legs shattered by sledgehammers), but while the franchise has been crawling along on life support for a while, it feels that O’Brien really has steered the franchise into a dead end by handing the reigns over to Maynard Odets.
I appreciate it when some horror films are mean, nasty and carry a noticable lack of hope, but when it’s done wrong, the relentless screaming, torture and ugly, down-beat endings just feel a little obnoxious and cruel for cruels sake. The end of movies like Se7en, Eden Lake or the original version of Speak No Evil deliver genuinely haunting endings that bore into your brains for weeks, Wrong Turn 5 gaffer taping a shotgun into someone’s mouth and then setting them on fire is just mean spirited shock value.
Whatever spark the franchise may of had has now pretty much spluttered out by this point and if you suddenly can’t trust a threesome of hulking hillbillies to get shit done on their own by their fifth film, then something has gone seriously askew.
The selection of dead students walking may not actually make a wrong turn in this once, but I certainly feel like the filmmakers did.
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