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| Editorial Reviews: |
|  |  | | A cannibal family in the backwoods of West Virginia attack a group of campers, but they must also face a group of escaped convicts who survived a bus | | | Well, it doesn't waste any time: the opening sequence of Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead gets cracking with an eyeball-popping sequence of gory horror that signals the carnage-fest to come. (And the term eyeball-popping is meant to be taken quite literally here.) This sequel in the crazed-inbred-hillbilly franchise places a group of hardened prisoners, and a few guards, in the midst of foresty mayhem, along with the lone survivor of the opening attack on river-rafting teens (Janet Montgomery). So after the first few minutes the entire film takes place at night in a thick forest, which leads to visual monotony despite the periodic attacks from insane rednecks and skin-lacerating booby traps. (In fact, the most heroic character deliberately leads the cons in circles in the forest--not the most exciting narrative device.) The dialogue is clunky and some of the peripheral acting is Z-movie level, but give the movie credit for including a couple of authentic badasses: Tamer Hassan (from Layer Cake and Eastern Promises) as a furious gangster, and hulking Gil Kolirin. The indestructibility of the villains makes any chance of credibility impossible (who knew inbreeding would result in such superpowers?), so the only choice is to sit back and witness the various ingenious ways of killing. Which are many. The coda will probably have viewers outraged, but by then you know what kind of movie you're watching. --Robert Horton
Stills from Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead (Click for larger image) | |
| Custom Reviews: | |
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| | All horror movie fans be advised stay away from this stupid movie, don't even think to rent it. This is the worst movie ever.
| | | this movie is lame, and maybe perhaps because i was expecting a really good horror movie for Halloween night viewing. the movie makes for a good campy/cheesy movie but it ends there. the original Wrong Turn is the only note-worthy movie in the trilogy.
| | The series gets even worse | |
| | You could say the Wrong Turn series has gone downhill ever since the first installment. Technically, that argument would be true. A boring and second-rate premise further desiccated by each installment and destined to eventually become so dehydrated in quality that the DVDs they're recorded on will be best used as jerky. There are numerous ways to chart the decline of the series: recognizable faces, self-awareness within the genre, relevance to its title or production values. By the time the series reached Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead it had failed in each of those areas leaving "fans" of the franchise wholly unsatisfied.
Police officers Nate (Tom Frederic) and Walter (Chucky Venice) comprise the force escorting a bus full of convicts from one prison to another. They decide to take a side route so as to avoid drawing any attention to a high-publicity convict in their care and consequently end up on the back roads in what we quickly learn is deadly mutant hick territory. All's not lost, however, as Nate grew up in these parts and has the know-how to lead the survivors after their bus crashes due to mutant hick attack. As the police, a girl who escaped an earlier attack (Janet Montgomery) and convicts (Tamer Hassan, Gil Kolirin, Tom McKay, Christian Contreras, et al.) work their way through the forest, they quickly come under bow and arrow fire from the two remaining mutants of the last film, because to make it a franchise they need to have some sort of continuity. By the time the action begins, there's really only one mutant, Three Finger, and he's as much their killer as their own avarice and distrust.
The kills never impress or surprise anyone familiar with the series and take that notion further by actually managing to disappoint. At least two characters meet their end at the hands of a long pole being jabbed through them and the only semi-decent kill, a man being flossed into three pieces, ends with such painfully awful special effects that you have to shake your head. The entire film suffers from a lack of originality or style. Instead of feeling like an autonomous film it feels like the scraps they couldn't incorporate into the first two pasted together into an unsightly Frankenstein monster of a movie: unwieldy and with no knowledge of how it came to be.
If you can watch the film without rolling your eyes whenever a poor CGI sequence comes up (the most notable being a man "dragged" along the street by a tow truck which reeks of poorly executed green screen), then maybe the writing will be enough to distract you. Whereas the first two maintained a sense of narrative by never being too indulgent to the writer, Left for Dead feels every bit like a screenwriter who thinks they're being witty by throwing in random bits of film geek talk and "homages" to better horror films. It may seem reverent to have Three Fingers idolizing the head of his deceased, disfigured leader but it reeks of a Friday the 13th rip-off. Or making references to obscure Michael Douglas films and then expecting us to believe that both cops happen to have seen said obscure film? The film seems to know it's a crappy horror sequel (breasts are shown in all glory by the 3:54 marker) but it seems to want things both ways. Take us seriously and yet let us indulge in a project where the writer gets to flex his geek muscles. It totally destroys any chance of the film being scary or funny and leaves us with a bland nothing featuring horrifically awful dialogue and acting that's sub-standard even for second-rate direct-to-DVD horror.
Most insulting of all is the title. Left for Dead may be the one film in the series where people actually are actively looking for the people who took a "wrong turn". But in this case - it wasn't even a wrong turn. They were very much on their intended route and forced off the road by the mutant in a tow truck. It's a double misnomer and just compounds the shortsighted nature of the whole ordeal.
Blu-ray Bonus Features:
Considering the series has fallen below all levels of horror franchise decency it's odd to see that someone making the movie thought people would be curious about the behind the scenes action - but they did. We end up with overly-comprehensive featurettes on the mutant Three Fingers, and two pieces on filming stunts, kills and horror. Considering the film isn't worth watching (unless you just have to know how the final mutants meet their demise) I'm hard-pressed to even say the extra features could positively affect the score of this disc.
| | Three Finger and his son Baby Splooge help the Wrong Turn franchise officially die with this recent installment. | |
| | The first Wrong Turn came out in the time when horror was just getting revitalized with the Saw films and a slew of successful remakes like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead. It also was part of the time's trend in that it was a non-self-referencial horror film that also was paying homage to the type of horror that was vogue in the mid to late 70's. The Texas Chainsaw remake and Rob Zombie's House of 1,000 Corpses were also part of this wave. The first Wrong Turn was surprisingly entertaining for me. It was stylishly made and directed by Rob Shmidt(Crime + Punishment in Suburbia), fun, and well acted. Sure, it was nothing original and towards the third act when the villains reluctance to die, no matter how hardcore the damage they took, pushed credulity, but I still enjoyed it and it brought me back to memories of the original Texas Chainsaw, The Hills Have Eyes, Last House on the Left, and Eaten Alive. It was good entertainment. Then years later the direct to video sequel, Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, was released and received much positive attention by fans and professional horror critics. It was energetically directed by first timer Joe Lynch(who was a clerk at 112 Video, a store I rented my horror from in my youth here in New York). It switched tones to more balls-out, in your face splatstick. It had a novel premise involving the hillbilly mutants attacking a group of contestants on a new reality show(very timely), and it had Henry Rollins pulling a Rambo and just being plain bad-a##! It was funny, fun, gross, well acted, and totally over the top to the point of hysteria. It's surprise success led to Fox now owning a profitable direct to video franchise and the inevitable Wrong Turn 3 was put into works. Well, here it is, and I assure you it won't go over as well as the previous films. It's quite mediocre and boring and the total quick death of this fun franchise.
None of the creative team, writers or directors, return for Wrong Turn 3, but that shouldn't be a negative sign due to the fact that that was the case with the fist sequel. Fox lets newcomers take a stab at their franchise and hope for the best. Well, this time they lost the hand. Director Declan O'brien isn't a first timer either when it comes to genre material. He's a veteran of Sci-Fi(I mean, Sy-Fy, D'oh) original productions like Cyclops and Rock Monster. I don't hold this against him. I was hoping this Wrong Turn sequel would be his road to legitimacy. His experience with the Sy-Fy Network means that he's a solid, fast working, journeyman director who can add flare to the lowest budgets, short scheduled shoot. Well, here the only thing the director contributes is efficiency. Unlike the previous Wrong Turn installments this film is without style. It's all by the numbers. There's no real or believable set ups. No suspense. It's just A to B to the next bloody death, and this film has the highest body count of all the Wrong Turn films. And the acting is mostly horrible. The lead prisoner bad guy, Chavez, is effective and the actor playing the hostage prison guard is good, but the rest of the cast, big or small parts, is terrible. It doesn't help that the script gives them dialogue only master thespians like Laurence Olivier could make convincing. I would say it's bad because nobody is committed to the characters, but it's worse then that, they are committed and their lack of acting chops makes it even more intolerable.
Plus, after Wrong Turn 2's ingenious, creative, and timely set up this film's plot is a real boring downer. It's been done so many times before, and done better. It's your basic plot about escaped convicts trying to make it out of the woods and holding some good guys hostage while they're all attacked by some inbred mutant hillbillys. Yawn. Been there done that. Sure, that's not a real problem if the director and the screenwriter are able to transcend the material and make the audience feel like we've never seen it before, but this film ain't that film. Plus, to make matters worse we spend more time with the convicts fighting each other over some conveniently found cash them we do with the survival of the fittest premise of man versus hillbilly. Hell, this script is so ham-fisted, it made Crocodile II(which had the same plot), seem downright Shakespearian. Also, unlike the previous films this one only focus on two mutants, the always returning from the dead Three Finger and his son Baby Splooge(the same baby born in Wrong Turn 2 and dubbed Baby Splooge by the filmmakers and not by the script). So, we get to see more of the always allusive Three Finger then ever before, and I assure you that's not a good thing. He's no longer creepy and more of a home made haunted house attraction. His maniacal creepy laugh so effective in the first film now just seems mannered and tacked on to compensate for the fact that this villain has no real character or personality. His son is in the film for minutes. We get a nice moment between pops and son and before you know it the little tykes head is on a spike. So much for a new character.
The make up in this film is also quite horrible. The first film, with the largest budget, had the benfit of having the late great Stan Winston as a producer and his special effects team to design the mutant make ups. The sequel had the great Bill Terazakis so they looked good too. This film is all rubber and no substance. I'm not sure if its the bad lighting or cinematography or if the make up is really that amateurish. The gore effects have no weight but they are right there and in your face. They're not even shocking or gross, because they look so phony. I know that can be a fun aspect of low budget horror, but in this film is just didn't work out that way. The opening scene follows Wrong Turn 2 in setting up some non-important characters and then killing them off in brutal ways. The fist film did it off screen, the second gave us a really macbre sight gag, and this film just gives us more victims. This time is just isn't interesting and just comes off as typical exploitation horror historionics. No excitement or repulsion, just waiting for the next scene to come.
The Blu Ray has some special features as well, not as many as the previous films. We get the obligatory deleted scenes. I didn't get through all of them, and I recommend you not even bother. We get three behind the scenes featurettes going over the special effects, the director and some of the fight scenes. Director Declan O'brien states that he wanted his film to be more action oriented then the previous installments. Which leads me to wonder why it's the least exciting and most boring of the three. Most of these featurettes go over the usual EPK stuff regarding how wonderful the director and is and how wonderful it is to work with everyone, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH! Not worth watching even if you enjoyed this film somehow.
Bottome line, if you're a fan of the first two Wrong Turn films you are going to watch this film, hopefully just as a rental. Your love and devotion to the horror franchise will make you do it regardless of my warning. But, if your just a plain horror fan and a moderate admirer of the first two films just skip this all together. You'll thank me.
| | Not terrible, but nothing special | |
| | The Wrong Turn franchise is for all intents and purposes a one trick pony show. The first film was decent enough, but its first direct-to-DVD sequel was surprisingly good for its type. Now, here we are with Wrong Turn 3, which finds Three Finger and his crew of deformed hillbilly cannibals back in action and looking for blood. The story picks up with a prisoner transport bus crashing in the woods, and the crew of surviving guards and prisoners are soon picked off one by one, with some spectacularly bloody results. And yes, while Wrong Turn 3 has no shortage of blood, gore, and dismemberment; there just isn't anything shocking enough or compelling enough to hold your interest for long. It's pretty predictable to a point, but there is enough of the horror goods here that makes it worth checking out regardless.
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