Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.0

Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings Blu-ray Movie Review

The latest in a series of wrong turns for the laziest horror franchise of the ‘00s.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater October 23, 2011

The Wrong Turn rednecksploitation series that got its start in 2003 is about a family of backwoods, bramble-brush West Virginian killer hillbillies who have mutated into grotesque monsters after several generations of inbreeding. The franchise is now in its own fourth generation, and its newest bastard spawn, the direct-to-video Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings, itself seems like the product of incest—a mishmash of cinematic DNA that, after being constantly reused over the course of the series, has left this latest film deformed and deficient, barely recognizable as entertainment. It’s part Texas Chain Saw Massacre, part Deliverance, and part The Hills Have Eyes, but this chimera takes only the worst genetic material from its horror movie parentage. In other words—and I’ll abandon the incest metaphor now—Bloody Beginnings is terrible. It’s tasteless, cruel, and not scary in the slightest; an exhausting experience that just isn’t enjoyable on any level. (Unless, that is, you’re looking for laughably gratuitous lesbian softcore sex scenes, of which there are two.) I’ll concede that the movie is minimally better than the criminally awful Wrong Turn 3: Dead End, but that really—really—isn’t saying much.

Pubescent Three-Finger, One-Eye, and Sawtooth...

As you can probably tell from the Bloody Beginnings sub-title, Wrong Turn 4 is a prequel, but it doesn’t really tell us anything we couldn’t have guessed about the series’ boogeymen, a trio of misshapen brothers who go by Sawtooth, One-Eye, and Three-Finger. The film opens in 1974 at an isolated West Virginian mental asylum, where we meet the three baddies as shaggy-haired feral pre-teens who were found in some back holler and locked up for their own good. We also learn how they got their defining physical characteristics—Sawtooth has a thing for sharpening his teeth against the concrete cell walls, One-Eye plucked out his other eye and ate it, and Three-Finger, yes, got hungry and nibbled off two of his digits. The head doctor gravely informs a visiting female colleague that these three brutes can feel no pain whatsoever and are extremely dangerous, and soon enough we get to see their capacity for carnage firsthand. In a sequence cheesily scored with Johann Strauss II’s “The Blue Danube”—Oh, look! Director Declan O’Brien learned how to set ultraviolence to classical music!—the brothers escape from their cell, release all of the asylum’s inmates, and go on a rampage, murdering orderlies, administering lethal shock treatments, and rigging up a barbed wire torture contraption used to pull one poor doctor limb from limb. Judging by the way many of the victims die throughout the rest of the film, the asylum apparently—and inexplicably—has an endless stockpile of barbed wire on hand.

Fast forward to a dorm room circa winter 2003, where not one, but two sweaty couples are getting it on simultaneously—a pair of ho-hum heteros and a preternaturally hot lesbian duo. (Of course.) A friend bursts through the door, calls them all “slutmonkeys,” and reminds them that they have to get a move on if they’re going to make it to the cabin by nightfall. You can see where this is going, right? The group of nine friends— who are as generic and forgettable as the no-name actors who play them—mount up on snowmobiles and head off into the wilderness, but they get distracted by all the x-treme fun they’re having and end up lost in the dark. When one of the guys suggests they go in one direction, another actually name-checks the movie and says, “He’s making a wrong turn, I know it.” Sweet screenwriting, broheim. Inevitably, they come across the prologue’s mental asylum, which is now seemingly abandoned, and decide to bed down for the night. (But not before getting blazed and drunk, and certainly not before the lesbians get another chance to get naked.) Bad move. Yes, everyone’s favorite cannibal hillbillies are still lurking in the sanatorium’s corridors, ready to feast on some juicy co-ed flesh.

From here, you know how it play out—in a series of stupid decisions and grisly deaths. Slasher films are all about the formula, but Wrong Turn 4 is so mechanically prescribed, worthless, and devoid of originality that it makes the Sorority Row remake look like Roman Polanski’s Repulsion in comparison. At least Wrong Turn 3 had a plot—an extraordinarily stupid one, but a plot nonetheless—whereas Bloody Beginnings is just another excuse to see horny young adults mutilated and murdered in increasingly “creative” ways. I’m almost surprised these kinds of films haven’t gone the porn route, dispensing with a story altogether and getting straight to the “good” stuff. Granted, there are some pretty gruesome kills here if that’s your thing—drill impalements, barbed wire decapitations, a flesh fondue party—but good gore does not a good movie make. There has to be something more, whether it’s compelling characters, a heightened sense of tension, or even just a laugh-out-loud-worthy level of so-bad-it’s-good awfulness. Bloody Beginnings is simply tiring. The acting is grating. The torture scenes are sadistic for the sake of pointless sadism. The film brings nothing new to the genre whatsoever, and it doesn’t even bring anything new to the Wrong Turn franchise. (Well, besides snowmobiles and lesbians, I guess.) To genuinely enjoy the movie, you’d probably have to be as baked as its dim-witted characters.

Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

I will say this: out of all the Wrong Turn films, Bloody Beginnings easily looks the best on Blu-ray. Easily. The 35mm grain in the first was smeared to oblivion with DNR, the second was shot on soft-looking digital video, and the third—which went back to actual film photography —was generally murky and unresolved. What a difference a few years makes. Bloody Beginnings was shot digitally, but the quality is much improved over that of the second film. The 1080p/AVC encode here is generally crisp and defined, with skin textures easily visible in close-ups—and believe me, you'll definitely see some close-ups of skin—and a strong sense of detail throughout. The daylight scenes tend to look best, with bright, saturated colors and next to no noise, but even the darker sequences are much, much cleaner and more vibrant than any of the previous films. You can tell there was some serious digital color grading in post to give some of the scenes inside the asylum more mood, but it's handled well and not overdone. Noise does spike occasionally, and there are some faint traces of banding, but nothing too distracting. The only oddity you might notice is that some of the snowmobiling scenes appear to have been shot with DSLRs, as you can see the common "rolling shutter" problem, which gives a kind of judder in shots with lots of motion.

Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Wrong Turn 4 features decent low-budget horror sound design by way of a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track. You know the drill —a mostly front-heavy presentation that occasionally calls the rear channels into action for directional effects and ambience. Wind whips through the surround speakers and water drips ominously, snowmobiles go tearing across the soundfield and mutants let rip with an enormous gas-powered ice borer. The mutilation scenes include all sorts of grisly, goopy sound effects. The Blue Danube and other less-classical musical cues have an appropriate amount of dynamic heft and, most importantly, dialogue is always clean and easy to understand, with no hissing, crackling, or muffling. The disc includes English SDH, Spanish, and French subtitles.

Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary by Declan O'Brien: The always enthusiastic Declan O'Brien takes us through the making of the film, but really, do you actually want to watch it again?
• Director's Die-ary's (1080i, 7:37): Ah, real clever. Anyway, this is a collection of short production diary clips featuring director Declan O'Brien.
• Making Another Wrong Turn (1080p, 12:36): A standard issue making-of featurette, mixing interviews with clips from the film.
• Lifestyles of the Sick and Infamous (1080p, 5:13): A short piece about the production design and filming inside an actual decomissioned mental hospital.
• Wrong Turn 4 Music Video featuring The Blackout City Kids (1080p, 3:24)
• Deleted Scenes (SD, 18:14)

Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

How and why are more Wrong Turn films being made? I have no idea, but hopefully the franchise ends here. Although Bloody Beginnings probably isn't the worst entry in the series—that honor goes to part three—it's hardly worth recommending to any besides the most undiscriminating horror fans. You can certainly do better for pre-Halloween entertainment. Unless you're some kind of Wrong Turn apologist— and a few of those do exist in the wild—avoid this one at all costs.