Rating summary

Movie		1.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		1.0

Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines Blu-ray Movie Review

The should-be-dead-by-now franchise takes yet another wrong turn...

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater October 30, 2012

Let's just say this up front: Wrong Turn 5 is certainly the worst entry in what's arguably the worst horror franchise of the past decade. If you value your time and money, you shouldn't even finish reading to the bottom of this paragraph. Forget that Wrong Turn 5 exists. Spend your hard-earned, entertainment-earmarked cash elsewhere. Buy some candy for trick-or-treaters instead. Throw a few bucks to the cardboard-sign toting homeless vet by the interstate onramp. Get drunk. Stock up on AA batteries. You get the idea—anything but this.

Because this movie doesn't respect you, as an audience. It doesn't respect the few fans of the series who are inexplicably left. And, most damningly, it has no respect for itself. Wrong Turn 5 exists for no other reason than to sucker people into buying it. Those that fall for this ruse—noticing the "ALL NEW MOVIE!" sticker on the front, and the slipcover, giving the illusion of a high-profile release—will receive a tedious hour and a half of awful acting, cheap-looking sets, cruelty-for-the-sake-of-cruelty, and a bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping premise that the movie doesn't even have the budget to fully realize. Is there gore? Sure. Gratuitous sex? Of course. But even those who set the lowest bar for horror movie enjoyment will be baffled by Wrong Turn 5's indifference to its own awfulness.

So, what happens this time around? Suprise! Horny, drugged up college kids get picked off one by one. The cardboard cutout twenty-somethings have traveled to the rural small town of Fairlake for the annual "Mountain Man Festival," a music fest that—as one reporter tells us—"rivals Coachella and Lollapalooza." Riiiiight. We never see the festival or the crowds. At most, we get thirty-odd extras wandering about an extremely fake-looking city block set, dressed up like Deliverance rejects. On the way to the festival, the kids crash their BMW swerving to avoid Maynard (Hellraiser's Doug Bradley), a redneck standing in the middle of the road, and when the hillbilly pulls a knife on them, the guys kick him to the asphalt and give him a beatdown they'll come to regret. Sheriff Angela (Camilla Arfwedson) arrives on the scene conveniently quickly, arresting everyone and holding them in the town's jail. She lets out most of the kids because they ask nicely, while noble Billy (Simon Ginty) stays behind, taking the rap for the enormous bag of drugs stashed in the car. Threatening Billy and the sheriff from his cell, Doug Bradley seems to be doing a piss-poor impersonation of Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, and his Maynard promises that before the night is over, death will come to them all.

See, Maynard is somehow related to ol' One Eye, Saw Tooth, and Three Finger, the incest-addled, impervious-to-pain Appalachian brothers we've grown to be bored with over the course of the quickly withering Wrong Turn series. These aren't cinematic villains; they're bad actors in what might as well be cheap rubber Halloween masks, and they're far more obnoxious than scary. (Okay, we get it, Three Finger, you can cut out the cackling now.) The slack-jawed lunatics cut the power to town, pull down the cellphone tower, and spend the next forty-five minutes antagonizing the college students, some of whom have shacked up in a cheap motel while the others idiotically wander the blacked-out streets. Well, street, singular. One girl gets her intestines fed to her. A drunk gets roasted inside an oil drum. Two guys are pulped to gory pieces on a soccer field by a tilling machine. And then there's the Rio Bravo-style hold-down-the-fort subplot, which doesn't even try to be tense. None of this is remotely thrilling or terrifying or even visually interesting.

The movie isn't so-bad-it's-good bad, or even just bad bad. It's aggressively unbearable. Writer/director Declan O'Brien—the hack responsible for the third and fourth films—is back yet again, and one wonders if he hates this gig or what. You know that feeling when, as a kid, your mom would get on your case about cleaning your room, so you'd do it, but angrily, begrudgingly, slamming dresser drawers and kicking your toys under your bed? Well, that's what Wrong Turn 5 feels like. It gets the job done spitefully, carelessly, with no joy or self-satisfaction. The story is rote, the gore routine, the tone callous and un-fun. The film was made for next-to-nothing in Bulgaria, features a cast predominantly made up of no-name British actors doing terrible American accents—fair enough, we've been murdering the King's English since 1776—and was very obviously shot predominantly on an indoor soundstage. I'd say "good luck suspending your disbelief," but considering this is a film about mutant hillbilly cannibals, that sentiment is already ridiculous. "Throw your standards for quality in the trash," would be a better recommendation. Better yet? Skip this z-grade horror pap entirely.

Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Wrong Turn 5 was shot digitally on a paltry budget, and the finished product looks it, with cheap sets, bad lighting, and an overall filmmaking aesthetic that isn't even up to made-for-TV standards. In so many ways, this is an ugly, ugly film. That said, the 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer we get on Blu-ray is true to source and largely free from any compression or encode issues. Sure, noise spikes a bit during darker scenes, and yes, there are occasional compression-heavy shots from unusual angles where it's obvious a less-capable and more portable camera was used—O'Brien mentions GoPro action cameras in his commentary track—but there are genuinely few distractions here besides the general cheapness of the project. The level of clarity is actually quite high most of the time, with visible fine detail in facial features and clothing textures. And while the cinematography is flat and bland and purely functional, color is adequately dense and contrast is good, with deep blacks and rarely overblown highlights. Wrong Turn 5 won't top anyone's Best Blu-ray Picture Quality of the Year list, but considering how awful the film is in just about every other regard, the high definition encode here is surprisingly decent.

Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

It's not going to rattle your walls, quake your bowels, or test the limits of your home theater system, but the movie's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track get the job done. The cringe-worthy dialogue is cleanly recorded and easily understood, and although the mix is decidedly front-heavy, you will notice occasional instances of rear-channel ambience and direction effects. Insect sounds. Crackling fire. A cackling hillbilly laugh moving through the space behind your head. You get the idea. It's all backed up by a dull but decent-sounding score comprised alternately of minor-key piano arpeggios and nondescript overdriven guitar riffing. The disc includes optional English SDH, Spanish, and French subtitles, which appear in easy-to-read white lettering.

Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary by Declan O'Brien: The director and the film's behind-the-scene producer enthusiastically discuss the making of the movie, but do you really want to give these people another hour and a half of your life?
• A Day in the Death (HD, 5:28): Some video diary-type BTS footage shot by the film's cast.
• Hillbilly Kills (HD, 6:44): The film's director and producer discuss the kills, some of which were apparently inspired by Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. Coulda fooled me.
• Director's Die-aries (HD, 8:29): Hardy har har. More behind the scenes footage, shot by the director.

Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Friends don't let friends waste their time on miserable straight-to-video horror sequel cash-ins. Wrong Turn 5 isn't just the worst film in a franchise that probably shouldn't have inspired any followups, it's also on the short list for the worst film I've personally seen in 2012. This is a movie that actively doesn't want you to enjoy it, and I'm at a loss as for why this series continues to stumble zombie-like forward. If I were Fox, I'd let it finally die or else reboot it with a decent budget and a director with a better vision for Appalachian hillbilly terror.