Click Above To Buy NOW!

I’m pretty sure the title of this movie is a sly reference to the state of this franchise after people get a hold of the third film in the Wrong Turn franchise. The first film was a sleeper horror hit with cool special effects, great killer hillbillies, and a stellar cast for a horror flick. The second film was somewhat of a disappointment, and while it wasn’t necessarily good, it had enough good stuff in it to leave horror fans disappointed instead of merely pissed off. Part 3 is the sequel that will piss you off. It’s dumb, completely lacks the spirit of the first two films, and has no actually good qualities whatsoever.

I’m actually pretty furious at this movie… but I have only myself to blame. Most franchises have a descending arc of decrepitude which can usually be faithfully followed to the ultimate conclusion… franchise-icide. I should have noticed that the huge gulf between the first film and the second film would continue onto the disparity between the second and third film. It’s my fault for blind-buying the film, something which I haven’t done since my fateful Constantine disaster. But it’s 20th Century Fox’ fault for making such a disaster of a movie.

This cheap piece of horror fan exploitation is an embarrassment. If I were the person in charge of 20th Century Fox, I wouldn’t have let this film see the light of day until it was fixed… which might be impossible. Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead is so ineptly conceived and executed that I have to wonder if this wasn’t actually a film school project shot by some talentless dudes on vacation in Bulgaria. That has to be the answer. No one could have actually paid people to produce this shit for them.

The plot… if you’re still interested, is as stupid as they come. After a briefly awesome scene of random adventurers getting killed by Three Finger (the hootin’ and hollerin’ mutant from the first film), we are whisked off to a poorly handled prison scene where your typical Arian asshole and Mexican gangster combine forces to break out of prison. The warden, having figured out their plot, whisks them out of the prison on a secret backroad… which leads right through rural West Virginia. Three Finger, inexplicably pissed off by the site of a prison bus, runs it off the road with his magical tow-truck. Now the guards must figure out a way to save their own lives and keep the criminals locked up while combating the wily homicidal machinations of Three Finger. But what it really boils down to is this: you’re going to watch a bunch of C-Level actors stumble around the woods for an hour and a half.

Director Declan O’Brien is a bastard for crafting this shit. O’Brien’s version of the Wrong Turn universe is dull and lifeless. It’s pretty hard to make a forest look boring as fuck, but O’Brien accomplishes it. The pacing of the film is miserable and O’Brien spends so much of the film making the characters explain shit that it bogs the movie down. The writing doesn’t help matters any, and many of the scenes seem ad-libbed, at least I hope it was ad-libbed, because if someone wrote this shit, they should have their fingers amputated with a butter knife. O’Brien fails to come up with interesting angles or pickups, and the complete lack of tension is a bigger letdown than finding out that the person you’re dating actually liked Saw V. This director should stay far away from anything horror, because he lacks the talent to scare even the least discriminating horror fan.

The cast is actually composed of people that the diehard horror fan has probably sceen… in shitty horror movies past. Tom Frederic (Blood Trails), who plays Nate, the beleaguered and dumb as fuck prison guard, is supposedly the star of the film. His performance is robotic, uncharismatic, and completely miserable to watch. Tamer Hassan (Eastern Promises, The Ferryman)… a British dude playing a Mexican criminal, isn’t nearly as bad in the film, but it’s not like he’s a highpoint either. The rest of the cast is incidental and terrible and not worth mentioning, except for the fact that one chick gets naked and shot through the boob.

Perhaps most disappointing is the fact that the special effects are so piss poor. I haven’t seen special effects this bad in a while. The people at Syfy Network probably look at this shit and laugh… and that’s bad. I don’t know that I could make stuff look this shitty using a bottle of ketchup and some Swiss cheese. Three Finger alone is enough to piss off the average horror fan. Whereas the original Three Finger was creepy and featured a textured makeup that looked real, the Three Finger in this movie looks like a stupid old man. They didn’t even get his laugh right. The kills are creative, but executed with CGI that wouldn’t impress a caveman.

Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead is miserable through and through. It’s a kick in the teeth for horror fans and an embarrassment for the horror genre. The directing sucks. The acting sucks. The story sucks. The CGI sucks. There’s nothing, besides a couple of boobs, in this movie that doesn’t suck.

Final Synopsis: This movie is terrible. It’s so bad, it might make you hate the first movie by proxy. Skip this shit with extreme prejudice.

Points Lost: -1 for a sub-standard cast, -1 for ruining Three Finger, -1 for bad CGI, -1 for bad makeup effects, -1 for a shitty story, -1 for continuity errors, -1 for bad directing, -1 for terrible writing, -1 for one dude repeatedly cocking a pump-action shotgun, even though he cocked it a minute or two before

Lesson Learned: Every time you point a pump-action shotgun at someone, you have to cock it.

Burning Question: Doesn’t 20th Century Fox have some sort of quality control?

Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead
1/10

Tags: 2009, backwoods horror, bad CGI, declan o'brien, gil kolirin, horror, horror movie, inbreds, janet montgomery, killer hillbillies, latest movie reviews, louise cliff, louise cliff boobs, louise cliff naked, petko zhikov, petko zhikov boobs, petko zhikov naked, recent3, sequel, shitty movies, shot through boobs, tamer hassan, tom frederic, wrong turn