Inbred mutants are nothing if not resilient; after all how do you explain the Wrong Turn movie racking up five entries within nine years when not a single one of them could be genuinely considered an actual classic. However, that didn’t stop the powers that be from turfing out yet another installment despite the franchise being well and truly out of ideas, but after taking the franchise into the realms of comedy in the second movie and heading into prequel territory with the fourth and fifth, the sixth movie attempts to go down the tried and tested route for all washed up franchises – the reboot.
Only it doesn’t… I mean, not really. While a reboot is supposed to alter vital details of an established series in order to revitalise it while still sticking to the basic concept, however, Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort doesn’t even bother to change the villain’s clothes and instead feels like someone has just inserted the Hillicker Brothers into an original screenplay. Fairly ironic for villains who demand that their bloodline be kept “pure”.
After having something of a mental breakdown after the stresses of Wall Street wore him down, Danny has discovered that he’s inherited a massive hotel resort located in the mountains of West Virgina. With nothing else keeping him in the city, the emotionally vulnerable young man he’s their with his supportive girlfriend Toni and a sprinkling of their friends who mostly all turn out to be fairly awful people. But while they all spread out across the resort to either steal antiques or get stoned while skinny dipping in the hot springs, the two staff who run the place take Danny aside and attempt to explain his true history to him.
You see, both Sally and Jackson have big plans for their cousin and it seems to include a worrying amount of incest as they need some fresh blood to come in and help flush out the gnarlier parts of their gene pool while still keeping things all in the family, so to speak. So before you know it, Danny’s new relatives are urging him to have sex with Sally and reclaim his birthright of lording it over the noticably inbred community that lurks in the forrest in secret. Of course, while all this is going on, Jackson let’s his three, malformed MVPs off the leash in the form of Three-Finger, Saw Tooth and One-Eye, who start stalking Danny’s friends and eliminating them in typically exaggerated fashion.
As the friends try to defend themselves, Toni finds that she’s locked in battle to save Danny’s very soul as Sally and Jackson try to use the lure of family to leverage their cousin over to the dark side – but is the prospect of fucking your cousin, running a hotel and ruling over a bunch of hillbilly mutants really more desirable than living a normal life? If Danny decides “yes”, then I guess Wall Street has a lot to answer for.
As I alluded to earlier, as reboots go, Wrong Turn 6 is a bit of a weird one as it simply decides to keep a lot of the Wrong Turn basics in place while tweaking some origins; however, the result of having its villains look and act exactly the same as past movies doesn’t quite give you the reboot vibes the film is apparently going for and instead feels like a normal entry that’s just fucked the established continuity up due to some very careless writing. For the last couple of installments, the Wrong Turn franchise has been struggling to make the three Hillicker Brothers a little more than just a trio of cookie cutter mutants living on the woods, but while the fourth movie gave them a workable origin, this sixth attempt makes the same mistakes as its immeadiate predecessor and chooses to once again cast Three-Finger, Saw Tooth and One-Eye as henchmen to a more conventional foe.
While part 5 had them under the thumb of Doug Bradley’s patriarchal serial killer, part 6 now fashions them as muscle for a whole inbred community that seem way more obsessed with incest than the entire fandom of Game Of Thrones. However, with the normal looking Chris Jarvis and Sadie Katz calling the shots as the brother and sister in charge of a cannibal cult, the importance of the original, three, mishapen faces of the franchise seems negligible at best and at worst feels like those awful Hellraiser sequels that just stuck Pinhead into unrelated scripts a hoped for the best.
However, discussing franchise fatigue in a series where I was feeling pretty tired by part 3 is fairly redundant and this latest attempt to keep the Wrong Turn lights on is just as tiresome and pointless as before. New director Valeri Milev sets everything up with the hurried eye of a low budget filmmaker and actually has quite a decent playground to tinker within the boundaries of a huge (and strangely brightly lit for a horror film) hotel where the action takes place. But it’s obvious that the Wrong Turn train has now well and truly run out of track and even some truly nasty kill sequences can’t cover up some glaring issues. I mean I’m not entirely sure what you want me to say; if someone being popped like a balloon by having having a fatal colonic delivered with a firehose can’t save your film, then I’m not entirely sure what can.
But while the three main antagonists have been relegated to henchman duties and are looking decidedly more rubbery from their designed by Stan Winston days, at least they still bring something to the table, even if it’s snapping a naked Roxanne Pallet from Emmerdale like a wishbone. The cast of victims on the other hand can barely offer up a single memorable character between them and are so interchangeable I genuinely couldn’t tell three of them apart until they were killed. Even worse is the fact that the whole film hinges on the male lead being able to organically emote going from being in a post-breakdown frame of mind to being lured into a world of murder and deviant behavior, but the guy barely looks like he could convincingly fake shock if he found out about a his surprise birthday party four hours early.
However, the movie seems to try to distract you by cramming in as much nudity as the Wrong Turn franchise has ever seen before, but while the women involved obviously go to the gym, when you consider that the underlying theme of the film is a guy being convinced to fuck his cousin, it ends up being way more creepy than titillating.
This, understandably, is where the road finally ended for Wrong Turn as we knew it and the future eventually yielded a more extreme makeover in 2021 that jettisoned the Hillickers entirely in favour of yet more cult community shenanigans. But then I guess if you needed proof that the writing on the wall for the franchise, the fact that neither a soft or a hard reboot could restore any sense of glory to a series thst didn’t have that much to start with is all that you could possibly need. However, I suppose I really should tip a tattered hat to the lumpy forms of the Hillickers, after all you have got to admit that fashioning a franchise this long out of a concept that isn’t fit to scrub Texas Chainsaw’s or The Hill’s Have Eyes’ outhouse is pretty impressive even if the lion’s share of the movies are as fun as a firehose enema. Consider me checked out.
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