Horror Movie Review: Wrong Turn 5 – Bloodlines (2012)

It’s not often you see a horror movie series fall so hard & so fast. Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines overheard someone claim it couldn’t get any worse then the fourth movie, so asked Wrong Turn 3: Dead: Left for Dead to hold its beer.

Coming only a year after Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings, Bloodlines is shockingly poor. A movie that has completely forgotten what the first few films were about…coherent plot with decent characters & violent scenes that made sense.

Bloodlines staggers like a drunk from one idiotic scene to the next with no reasoning nor sense behind any of it. It’s incredibly disappointing considering the good quality of the first three movies.

You can read our reviews of all the Wrong Turn movies below.

2003 – Wrong Turn
2007 – Wrong Turn 2: Dead End
2009 – Wrong Turn 3: Left For Dead
2011 – Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings

The writing was on the wall though with Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings. A prequel that really didn’t have much to shout about. Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines serves as a sequel to to that movie but a prequel to the first three. Meaning you can telegraph the ending straight away seeing as the three cannibal killers will have to survive.

Having left the asylum from Bloody Beginnings, the 3 deformed brothers (Three Finger, Saw Tooth & One Eye) are living in the woods near the town of Fairlake, West Virginia. For reasons that are never really explained the trio are working with serial killer Maynard Odet (Doug Bradley). Somehow he manages to keep them under control, ordering them around & even hitting them, later referring to them ‘as his boys’.

The first death comes quite quickly as a snotty new reporter is offed with an axe in the woods. Her entire character can be summed up with that one word, ‘snotty’. Get used to characters being defined by their words here, Wrong Turn 5 doesn’t put in much effort.

The reporter was there to cover the Mountain Man Music Festival. A Halloween celebration of all things ‘hick’ that coincidentally involves people dressing up like deformed hillbillies. See where this is going yet?

Meanwhile, five friends (they have names but it really doesn’t matter) are on the road driving to the festival when they almost run down Maynard. They crash the car but escape unharmed so go to check on Maynard who is lying down in the road. Once closer, he attacks the college kids with a knife but is over-powered by the group.

Just then the Sheriff arrives (Camilla Arfwedson) & arrests everyone involved. She leaves her deputy to look after the vehicle & heads back into town. A few moments later he’s dead at the hands of the cannibals (they eat his ears while he doesn’t even try to defend himself).

The killer hicks want Maynard back so head into town disabling the phone lines & the power. In the police station Maynard begins to tease the Sherrif about ‘his boys’ coming to him but she doesn’t listen. Unfortunately for her, they are & with the rest of the force further in town dealing with the music festival she is forced to team up with the college kids she arrested.

Fuck, this is a mess of a movie. Not just the most poorly written & acted characters of the Wrong Turn series but some of the worst in horror. Devoid of any life, of any memorable attributes it’s near cringe-inducing at times. The conversation between the Sheriff & her husband made me blush, it’s that embarrassingly bad.

All you can hope for in a movie like this is death. Lots of gory & violent death & while it delivers on some of that, it still feels like another backwards step. In an attempt to make every kill memorable the movie reaches wacky levels that utilise some very bad CGI. Rather then focus on the murderous hillbilly freaks slaughtered randoms at a music festival, we get the same cat & mouse stuff we’ve seen too many times before.

Except here the characters are absolute idiots. Selfish, uninteresting idiots.

For the entire movie (save for the very start) you won’t even know any kind of festival that draws the kind of numbers Burning Man does, is actually happening. The streets are silent, it might as well be a ghost town.

It relies on far too many conveniences for it to make any sense.

The worst Wrong Turn movie so far has killed any enthusiasm I had for the series. It drags, it repeats & it offers almost zero moments that make it redeemable.