Main cast: Jenny Pudavick (Kenia Perrin), Tenika Davis (Sara Washington), Kaitlyn Wong (Bridget Manalo), Terra Vnesa (Jenna Rivers), Ali Tataryn (Lauren Perry), Samantha Kendrick (Claire Kendrick), Victor Zinck Jr (Kyle Pappas), Dean Armstrong (Daniel Burlingame), and Sean Skene (Vincent, Three Finger)
Director: Declan O’Brien
The Wrong Turn franchise didn’t just take a wrong turn with Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings, it drove straight into a blizzard of brainless plotlines and snowbound absurdity. This is a chillingly bad prequel that answers none of the questions we never asked and leaves us colder than the frozen corpses scattered across its runtime.
After a bloody prologue, the movie zooms in on a jaw-dropping CRINGE scene featuring two couples—one straight, one lesbian—getting it on in the same room, like a bizarre PSA against group intimacy. Apparently, this is director (and now writer) Declan O’Brien’s idea of reeling in thirsty viewers with a literal bang. Joke’s on them, though, because after this awkward, eyebrow-scorching opener, the movie turns into a T&A desert where the closest thing to titillation is someone’s frozen intestines spilling out.
Our doomed party of human nitwits sets off for a snowmobile adventure, aiming for a friend’s cabin in the woods. Naturally, they get lost and decide to spend the night in an abandoned sanatorium.
Fun fact: this isn’t just any creepy asylum; it’s the home of our three inbred cannibal hillbillies—Three Finger, One Eye, and Saw Tooth—who apparently can’t feel pain. Too bad we can’t say the same about the audience. After slaughtering the entire staff decades ago, these flesh-eating fiends have been patiently waiting for clueless snowmobilers to drop by. How hospitable!
Yes, the gore is plentiful—arguably the movie’s only redeeming quality—but even that feels like cheap ketchup on stale fries. Sure, there are creative kills—one fellow has bits of his body cut and cooked in oil while he is still alive—but the fake-looking effects often pull you out of the moment. Still, if you’ve ever wanted to see gallons of fake blood splattered across every possible surface, you’re in luck.
The protagonists, bless their gorgeous-but-dim-witted souls, stumble through every possible horror trope. By the movie’s midpoint, they have the cannibals at their mercy and—get this—decide not to kill them because it would make them no better than the cannibals. Predictably, this moral epiphany goes about as well as trying to build a snowman during a heatwave, and the cannibals gleefully flip the script. At this point, you’re no longer rooting for the humans. You’re in full Team Cannibal, cheering for these three charming carnivores to clean house.
Character depth? Nonexistent. The cannibals are one-note. The victims are even more one-note. The plot is as hollow as a gutted torso, and the setting—a potentially spooky snowbound sanatorium—is utterly wasted in Mr O’Brien’s hands. Everything exists purely as a flimsy excuse to serve up gore, and somehow, despite all the blood and guts, the movie is painfully boring.
Kudos to the camera crew and special effects team for their valiant effort—though their work feels wasted in this tasteless display of “what not to do” in horror filmmaking. By the time the credits roll, you’ll be left wondering how a movie this gruesome could feel so lifeless.
Watch it if you’re curious, but don’t say we didn’t warn you. When you find yourself scrubbing the bad taste from your tongue afterward, you’ll only have yourself to blame.
