Blu-ray Review: Wrong Turn 4 – Bloody Beginnings

It’s rare that you get that feeling of utter and total incompetence within the first thirty seconds of watching a motion picture — even if it’s one of the many crappy, direct-to-video torture porn flicks that infiltrate video store shelves every year. And yet, as soon as two ham-fisted Canadian actors walk onscreen and introduce the inbred cannibalistic antagonists of Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings, only to be upstaged by the lousy makeup and appalling acting of their silent co-stars. And it only gets worse from there, as the film’s murderous marauders make merry after they escape their confines and slaughter every sane person about in the film’s blood-spattered pre-credit sequence.

And then, true to degrading horror subgenre form, we are treated to a bit of good ol’ T&A once said credits have finished rolling; a flaunting of flesh in a fully favorable fashion courtesy of several shapely college-aged dolts preparing to go on a snowbound mini-vacation in the mountains of West Virginia (played here by Eastern Canada). Lost in the snow, the harebrained harlots — along with their respective male counterparts — set foot in the now-deserted and isolated loony bin, only to be terrorized (and sometimes eaten) by the deadly adversaries, who are strangely adept at operating modern machinery and snowmobiles despite having been living in an abandoned sanitarium for the last several decades.

To call Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings “one of the dumbest direct-to-video prequels to unwanted torture porn franchises of all time” would be selling it short. The performances made me long for the just-as-bad-but-far-more-dignified acting seen in the original Friday the 13th movies, while the special effects of this preposterous prequel — a combination of phony-looking rubber appliances and horrendous CGI — left nothing to either the imagination (because the people who make and view these abominations have no imagination) or my will to go on living in this world.

And, to top it all off, the movie features a clichéd, stereotypical lesbian couple who are brought to stagnant, untalented, languid and whiny life by the movie’s only two ethnic actresses.

Yawn.

Fox Home Entertainment brings the unnecessary, uncalled-for, and unbelievably unsophisticated Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings to home video so that it may mortify generations of horror lovers in this Blu-ray/DVD Combo pack, which boasts a fairly fine A/V presentation and several special features; including an audio commentary with writer/director Declan O’Brien, a couple of Behind-the-Scenes and Making-Of featurettes, and a few deleted scenes.

In short: skip it.