With expectations firmly below sea level and non-too-enticing advance word from friends who had gotten screeners, I had little reason to go see Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings; in fact the only reason I went is to preserve a “record” that will impress absolutely no one. However, I don’t regret going for a second; the movie is pretty bad, but it’s that exact right kind of bad that made it a hoot to watch with a few pals and a full crowd of the type of over-excited goons who come to free screenings like this.
Actually it starts almost legitimately good, back in the 1970s, when our hero mutants are still children and locked up in a sanatorium (the movie actually explains the difference between a sanatorium and a sanitarium. I actually learned something from Wrong Turn 4). Their fellow inmates are a bunch of other dudes who could probably lead their own horror movies, and for a while I thought it was going to be an Alone In The Dark/Don’t Look In The Basement scenario. But after a new nurse accidentally lets one of them grab her barrette through the bars on his cell, they pick their cell lock and all get loose, running rampant and killing the head doctor in a Saw-esque barbed wire trap that pulls his hands and feet apart in delightfully gory (and practical!) fashion, while the other inmates just sort of goof off and enjoy their freedom. So far, so good.
Then we meet our idiotic teens, of which there are too many (ten!), and things look grim again, as they’re all obnoxious and horny and largely interchangeable (points for offering a lesbian pair though, skewing the male/female ratio a bit to make it slightly less confusing who’s who). The snowbound setting is a nice change of scenery, and by taking place in 2003 we can have all three of the (adult) mutants again, but they do a lousy job on the makeup – they look nothing like their counterparts from the first film, even though they are set only a few months apart. They also seem remarkably stupid, getting lost instantly and then seeing the abandoned sanatorium in the background, resulting in the following exchange:
Idiot #1: “What is that?”
Idiot #2: “I think it’s a building!”
However, once the killers show up (thankfully not TOO long of a wait) it improves considerably, even if for not the reasons writer/director Declan O’Brien intended. All of a sudden our protagonists become master strategists, coming up with complicated plans instantaneously, and even weirder – they work! These schmucks, who couldn’t even positively identify a building an hour ago, are able to lure all three mutants into a cell and lock them up. They’re also adamant about sticking together more often than not, which is a nice little touch, except for one guy that they inexplicably leave on the floor covered in the blood of his girlfriend, whose death was more or less his fault. The dialogue even improves a touch; the “porterhouse steak” line got the best non-kill response in the entire movie.
Read the rest of the review @ Horrormovieday.com
