Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead

As a fan of the first two 'Wrong Turn' films, I was expecting this to be a good but not great film with enough gore/horror/comedy to keep me entertained for 90 minutes. How wrong I was. The plot consists of this; four college kids are out rafting in the Bluefish River area, however their fun is abruptly ended when they are attacked by the mutant cannibal hillbilly Three Finger (Borislav Iliev). Only the teenager Alex (Janet Montgomery) succeeds in escaping running through the woods. Meanwhile, a group of dangerous criminals are transported from the West Virginia Grafton Penitentiary in a custody bus escorted by three security guards through the backwoods. Predictably the bus is attacked by Three Finger, causing the bus to crash in the woods and the struggle for power and survival begins.

Initially, I thought the plot was fairly well thought out and had the potential to work quite well. However, it doesn't work and these are the reasons why; the terrible casting, the laughable special effects and the dire script. I understand that this was a low budget horror movie but it could have been done so much better. The casting of British actors in American parts didn't help the film either with most of the casts accents slipping constantly, Tamer Hassan is particularly bad in his role and often reveals his strong London accent.

The special effects are beyond cheap and they look like something from the 70s or 80s. But undoubtedly the worst element of this movie is the script which could have been written by a couple of teenagers, the guards and cops have clichéd dialogue and the other actors have such a poor script to work with you almost begin to feel sorry for them.

Overall this movie is very poor and most importantly not scary in the slightest. In the end I found it a little insulting to the 'Wrong Turn' franchise.

I give it 2/10 and I think that may be slightly generous.

"Wrong Turn" was a great movie, the first one that is, then it started to go somewhat downhill in part 2, and now having seen part 3, I must say I am at a loss here. Why is the series on a downward slope and not able to pull up?

The story in "Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead" is not really bad as such, but it is the lack of excitement and thrills that makes it less than mediocre. And also that there is basically only one of these misshapen mountain folk running around. Sure, you see a boy as well and another towards the end, but throughout the entire movie it is just a single one doing all the killing. And he looks comical and goofy, so it is very hard to take him serious as a murdering mad man.

There is an okay amount of mutilation, blood and gore in this third movie, and that is one of the better things about it. And another thing that made it bearable to sit through was that the people they had cast for the various roles were actually doing good jobs with their given characters. (Just hard to take the mountain man serious as he looked like a spoof character!)

There isn't really any great plot twists or surprises to the movie, and it plows forward at a fairly good pace. The only surprise twist there was in the movie, was the end scene. I enjoyed it, and think it was actually a nice touch to the movie. But all throughout the movie I sat and hoped for the movie to pick up and shift into a higher gear.

And there were some pretty funny errors and goofs in the movie. For starters, Chavez must have incredible arm strength to be able to hold a shotgun out in stretched arm and fire it without any recoil. That was hilarious, even worse than Rambo and his guns. The other thing I noticed was when they cut off the legs to remove the dead person from the chain, it must have been some amazingly sharp blade on that knife as it cut through meat and muscle like butter, and it cut through bone apparently without even slowing down - or perhaps that convict didn't have any shin bones? It was just awful.

I am sure that newcomers to the "Wrong Turn" series, will find it enjoyable, but if you are a seasoned and weathered gore hound, then you will find "Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead" to be nothing particularly interesting and to be a fairly mediocre movie at best. I have seen "Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead" twice now since it came out in 2009, and can't say that it has gotten any better since.

Despite this, then I will still give parts 4 and 5 a go as well, just to have seen it all.

Wrong Turn 3 (2009)

* (out of 4)

Downright horrid third entry in the series has a bus full of convicts and police taking a shortcut through the West Virginia mountains when they're ran off the road. The cons take control of the situation and they head off in the woods but it doesn't take long before a mutant redneck shows up to take them out.

WRONG TURN 3 is a direct-to-video release that is without question one of the worst horror films that you're going to see from this era and there's no doubt that it's a major step down from the previous two installments. If you ever want to show someone what a cheap, wannabe attempt to rip off fans is then this here would be the perfect example. Not only are we given an incredibly stupid plot full of annoying, worthless characters but we're also given some of the cheapest looking special effects that you'll ever see. Whereas the first WRONG TURN went for suspense and the second went for over-the-top gore, this one here is just an awful attempt at making money.

There are countless problems with this thing but we'll start with the CGI effects. To say they're awful would be putting it too kindly because these things are among the worst you're ever going to see. Yes, there's a lot of violence and gore here but none of it is effective because of how fake it looks. Just take a look at the scene where one man is split into three pieces. The CGI effect makes it look like jello has been sliced because when the man is sliced he just perfectly falls onto the ground in these pieces and not even the blood or guts inside of him come falling out. Even worse is a scene towards the start where someone takes an incredibly fake look arrow through the eye.

The characters are another major problem because you've really got no one to cheer for. The convicts are all people you hate and you want to see them finished off but before you get to that you've got to endure God-awful fighting and bickering. The good guys here are all rather boring, bland and you just don't care what happens to them. Even the mutant here is boring and whereas they're were brought to life in the first two, here they're just a cheap killing machine that adds nothing to the picture. Even the performances are pretty much forgettable as is everything else in this mess of a film.

Movie #2 in the series was superior. This? The mutant hillbilly's makeup might have been effective, only with the poor lighting and cinematography, one couldn't tell. There was a lack of practical FX, instead they went the CGI route which would've been effective if someone with any skill had handled it. Seriously, why does anyone watch this kinda stuff= clever, well done kills and maybe some action scenes that give some amount of terror or tension. For whatever reason this movie missed it's mark. But it was probably intended as a direct to video film and not worth putting any properly trained personnel onto the project. 3-fingers certainly kept coming, beyond all realism, and the actor was probably the best thing in this disaster. The knees-down appearance of another person at the end with a dripping propeller blade shaft makes it appear that there's an unseen mutant hillbilly ready for a forth film. Let's not encourage that.

Well they did the teenage/young adults, they did a reality spin, now Wrong Turn takes on some prisoners. This is good, as we have no reason to give a damn about those up for the killing. It removes any need for character development, not usually a plus but we all know why we came to this film. It's a shame they've reduced the mutated hillbilly family to pretty much just one guy. There's needless gore, repetitive chase sequences and a bizarre car scene which is a mix of very bad greenscreen and location work. It was confusing. The ending really ticked me off though, the ultimate in tacked on, thoughtless, middle finger up to the audience endings. Even for something this cheap and quick, they could have at least respected the characters a tiny bit.