By Geno McGahee
“Cannibal hillbillies my brother told me about. Who else could it be?” – Lauren (Ali Tataryn)
Why do all of these discount bins have copies of the WRONG TURN series of films? As much as I don’t want to, I end up buying them because they are so cheap and for three bucks or so, it’s worth a watch….most of the time. I have seen and reviewed them all with the exception of the fourth entry: WRONG TURN 4: BLOODY BEGINNINGS, but as fate would have it, it just showed up one day at a small store for the reasonable price of three dollars. Was this a higher power demanding that I complete my film reviews of this series? I’d like to think so. How could I live if I reviewed all of the series without covering the fourth, especially considering that this was their origin story.
We begin in an asylum in 1974, where they keep deformed inbred patients apparently with three youngsters that they consider the worst. Of course, these are our favorite hillbilly cannibal mutants, Three Finger (Sean Skene), One Eye (Daniel Skene) and Saw Tooth (Scott Johnson). They were found eating their parents and are now being detained and monitored. Dr. Ann Marie McQuaid (Kristen Harris) is new to the hospital and has a lot of interest in this trio and plans to implement her ideas to reach them and help them, but Dr. Ryan (Arne MacPherson), lets her know that there is no helping them.
The trio escapes and all hell breaks loose. They release all of the mutant patients and they do what all crazy inbred patients would do. They dance around, terrorize the staff, have wheelchair races and perform surgeries on the doctors. I think they told the extras in this movie “just be weird” and they obliged. I felt bad for Dr. McQuaid as she was put in a wheelchair and sped around the hospital hallways. She was then hooked up to electricity and shocked to death by the hillbilly trio. Kristen Harris did a good job in this film, despite her small role. I could feel her pain.
We move ahead to the present time and to a double love scene. Vincent (Sean Skene) and Jenna (Terra Vnesa) are going at it hot and heavy while Bridget (Kaitlyn Leeb) and Sara (Tenika Davis) are doing the same. My expectations get rather low when the film has T&A in the first fifteen minutes, much like JOY RIDE 3…which was written by Declan O’Brien, just like this film was! O’Brien, you perv you!
Kenia (Jennifer Pudavick) lets herself in, makes several references to their sexual activity, and then reminds them that they are all going on a trip to a cabin. They meet up with Daniel (Dean Armstrong), his girlfriend, Lauren (Ali Tataryn), Claire (Samantha Kendrick) and her man, Kyle (Victor Zinck, JR.). They are going to meet up with Porter, Kenia’s boyfriend, at the cabin, but Kyle gets them lost and they are about to freeze to death when they stumble upon the old asylum. They let themselves in and begin to make themselves at home, but they are not alone.
Vincent, the prankster, decides to go exploring the first night there and stumbles across Sara and Bridget at it again. Declan O’Brien could not get enough of this hot lesbian action apparently. I wonder if the first draft of this screenplay was stuck together. Anyway, Vincent finds Porter dead and meets up with the huge and ugly Saw Tooth and pays the price. It had to happen early because Sean Skene plays both the role of Vincent and Three Finger. Three Finger is my favorite hillbilly inbred cannibal character and you can’t have the actor distracted. He needs to focus.
The next morning, the group goes looking for Vincent and he’s nowhere to be found. I’m glad this film wasn’t found footage. The more I watched it, the more I thought that it could have easily turned that way. The film trudges along and those crazy hillbillies strike again with their usage of barbed wire. Poor Claire, given the least amount of lines in the film, was the next to go. She gave a great death scene though…outside of the bad CGI, but it’s a WRONG TURN movie. Bad CGI is part of the charm.
The group bans together and actually locks the trio into one of the cells. Kyle douses them with kerosene and is about to burn them alive when Kenia steps in and insists that they live. WHAT?!! Out of everything in this movie that I do not understand, this takes the cake. They killed their friends, did a lot of damage to their snowmobiles, and considering that they don’t work, they’d never be able to pay for damages, and they were attempting to kill them at the time of their capture and Kenia wants them to live? She tells Kyle that he won’t be able to live with it, but we find out later (spoiler) that he is not going to live at all if he doesn’t kill those bastards.
Not surprisingly, they escape the cage and go on the attack again and the chase goes out into the snow where the hillbillies have now fixed the snowmobiles and are riding them around with weapons in hand, killing people like that old Sega Genesis game “ROAD RASH.” Remember that game? I used to love that game. Time for a reboot.
WRONG TURN 4: BLOODY BEGINNINGS started out with a great deal of promise. The production level was better than normal, the cast was strong and the overall atmosphere was fun, but it ran out of steam. Once the characters got into the asylum, there was a lot of filler and repetition and not enough of Three Finger and his jovial behavior. No matter how bad things get, Three Finger was there to laugh hysterically about it. Sean Skene did a very good job as Three Finger and did well as Vincent, even if the character was rather empty. I think that was the biggest problem with this film. There was very little character development. The elements were here to make a good movie, but the cast didn’t have much to work with.
Jennifer Pudavick did a good job as the tough leader in this, but you don’t know much about her character. I guess the best developed character was Lauren. At least I knew that she was told about the hillbilly cannibals as a child. She has the best line in the film when she says “cannibal hillbillies my brother told me about. Who else could it be?” I’m going to use that the next time I get a phone call that hangs up. “Who was it Geno?” “Cannibal hillbillies that my brother told me about. Who else could it be?”
WRONG TURN 4: BLOODY BEGINNINGS is not very good but if you like the series or you just force yourself to sit through them like me, it’s worth a watch. I reluctantly recommend it, but go in with low expectations.
Rating: 4.5/10