Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings

So...I realized the other day that I'm getting pretty close to having watched 100 slasher flicks for this blog. Weird, huh? Should I celebrate, or just check myself into Arkham Asylum right now? Anyway, I thought that the movie this week would be another milestone(the 4th Wrong Turn film, and, I assumed, the last), but then I read that the 5th one is on the way! Yikes...what's next, Cannibals In the Hood? In-Bred In Space? While you ponder the possibilities, I'll just post my usual blah blah blah about SPOILERS...

Ready? Okay, so Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings starts out in the 1970's. Groovy. Our mutants are all patients at a mental health facility called Glenville, living in a ward reserved for only the most extreme nut jobs.

A doctor by the name of Brendan Ryan is giving a tour of the hospital to a new employee, Dr. McQuaid. After a patient nearly tears her hair out, the new doc is shown the cell in which Three Finger, One Eye and Saw-Tooth all reside. Dr. Ryan reveals that both Three Finger and One Eye eat their own missing body parts, while Saw-Tooth acquired his name by sharpening his teeth on the walls of the cell.

When Dr. Ryan and the new nurse leave, one of the patients reveals that he has a key, made from the hair clip that he ripped off of Dr. McQuaid's head. He uses it on his cell door, but tosses it to the 3 mutants, after they nearly blow his escape plan with their outraged grunts and shrieks. I guess no one ever asked them to use their "indoor voices", huh?

So, the goony trio get out, and more or less ignore all of the other patients who beg them for the key. Bastards! The noise of all of the patients carrying on brings a staff member in, and the inbreds jump him. They eat part of his face, pluck out one of his eyes for a snack, then continue on with their big escape. Before they leave though, one of them hits a large button that opens the other cells. I take back my earlier comment.

The hospital is quickly thrown into complete chaos by the loose patients, and all of them(not just the cannibal trio) delight in terrorizing and torturing their former captors. They strap them into wheelchairs and gurneys, they drown them in hydrotherapy tubs, they shock them to death...you name it, these guys do it. Doctor McQuaid is given electroshock until her scalp smokes.

Doctor Ryan has all 4 of his limbs wrapped in wires, which are attached to chains. At the flip of a switch, the chains pull the wires, until they slice through his limbs. He screams as his arms and legs are severed, then dies.

And then we get the opening credits.

Wow. I can almost guarantee that nothing else we see in this film will top that whole...whoa, what do we have here? The movie went from "torture porn" to just "porn". I did not see that twist coming! 2 different couples are screwing: the first pair are a white heterosexual couple, and the other pair are interracial lesbians. Go take a break, I need to study this scene for symbolism. Come back in, oh, about 10 minutes.

Anyway, all kidding aside, another girl walks into the middle of this Roman orgy, and demands that they get dressed. At this point, there are a lot of names to remember....Daniel and Lauren are the first couple we saw; the lesbians are Sara(black chick) and Bridget(Asian chick); and the rest are Kenia, Claire, Kyle, Jenna, Vincent and Porter, Bashful, Sneezy and Grumpy. I guess the slasher movie gods heard me ask for a larger cast of victims when I criticized Husk.

As they horse around in a brief snowmobile sequence(MONTAGE!), bad weather moves in. They find the old building that used to be a mental hospital, and quickly approach it to seek shelter. Geez, that was fast! We don't even really know most of these schmucks, and they're almost volunteering to be human sacrifices.

And on a quasi-related note...what was the aftermath of the asylum escape? Didn't the authorities notice that the staff of the place never left the place, or concerned family members? What about the other escaped patients? This thing has set some kind of record for number of plot-holes in direct proportion to running time...I swear, to watch these slasher movies every week, a lobotomy should be required.

Well, since no one thought of that little detail, these numbskulls decide to explore their surroundings. As a group, they quickly locate the furnace, then decide to call their buddy Porter, to let him know why they still haven't arrived at his place. No cell reception in the asylum, though, so they decide to try to contact him later.

After the furnace is lit, Kyle apologizes to the group for stranding them for the night. They seem pretty forgiving, especially after a proposal is made to explore the building. Ay-yi-yi. The guys all decide to search the place, as do a couple of the girls. The rest of the girls stay near the furnace.

The explorers find Dr. Ryan's office, and find some Scotch. They find a file about our 3 mutants, and then we get a lesson in linguistics. Apparently, the building is a sanitorium, not a sanitarium. The difference is that the sanitorium specializes in the most dangerous kooks, not just kooks in general. "The More You Know..." *cue sappy music and an NBC logo*

After that fun fact, they all return to the boiler room. There's a brief sequence, in which we see the hillbillies returning to their "home" with a body that I'm assuming is Parker. No sooner have they all reunited, when Jenna, Vincent and Kenia decide to look for beds or mattresses to sleep on for the night.

At the first room that they find, Vincent tells the 2 women to wait in the hall, while he goes in for a look. After a few seconds, they hear what sounds like a scuffle, followed by dead silence. When Vincent doesn't answer their calls into the room, Kenia and Jenna go in after him. To no one's surprise(except for the pair of girls), he leaps out of the shadows to frighten them. They head back to the group, unaware that one of the cannibals is now following them.

After some more mindless banter, they figure out how to turn on the electricity, and throw an impromptu party in celebration. An inbred is watching from a distance. In what I guess passes for irony in these films, much of their party resembles the chaos when the patients ran loose in the halls in the past, including wheelchair races and some general havoc.

They find a film, and Kyle gets a projector running. The movie shows what happens in a typical electroshock session, and that gives Lauren a flashback, of sorts. She tells her friends that her older brother used to terrify her with stories about the deranged patients in the building. She also mentions the 3 killers and their escape, so I guess the movie heard me complaining about that.

Everyone splits to find beds for the night. More softcore lesbian sex. Then Vincent wanders the corridors by himself and discovers Porter's body. Before he can run off to tell the others, a mutant stabs him. Not sure if Vincent is dead or not, because the screen fades out in a blur.

The next morning, the remaining group split up to find Vincent. They find blood and signs of a struggle, but not much else. Jenna somehow wanders away, and sees 2 of the cannibals mutilating what used to be Porter. When the other search parties gather to compare notes, Jenna rushes in and informs them that Porter is dead.

The cannibals then toss Porter's head into the room, wrapped up in his shirt. As the teens all scream and panic, Claire gets caught in a noose made out of wire, and is pulled toward the ceiling. When her well-meaning but incredibly stupid friends try to drag her back down, they end up beheading her instead. Not too bright...

The group, now down to 6, find that the snowmobiles have been sabotaged. Lauren straps on some skis, and announces that she'll race down the mountain and get help. Yeah, sure she will. Lauren's going to save her own ass!

They all hide in Dr. McQuaid's office, where Kyle finds a file that pretty much informs us about the cannibals, but it's all stuff we know. Kyle, Dan and Sara make a run back into the basement to look for weapons, leaving Kenia, Bridget and I-Don't-Know locked in the office. One-Eye tries to get at the girls by drilling through the door, but they stab him in the hand.

Kyle and Sara come back, and tell the others that Dan was left behind. While they try to come up with a plan, Dan is slowly being tortured by the cannibals, who are preparing to turn him into a stew. The others reason that his torture might distract the cannibals long enough for them to either kill the trio or escape.

Dan's death takes longer than both World Wars combined. Kyle watches from a hiding place and does nothing to save Dan, because then he might actually become a decent human being. Instead, he sneaks back to the others, and they devise a plan to try to trap the cannibals and burn them alive. That would have been a good plan about 10 minutes ago, dumbasses. I'll bet Dan thinks so as well....Oh, and there's a gag involving one of the cannibals eating a piece of Dan, and almost choking to death.

The teens carry out their plan, and herd the killers into a cell. Everyone wants to kill them except Kenia, who convinces the others to be merciful. The girls leave Kyle to guard the cell, while they search for new spark plugs to repair the snowmobiles. Predictably, the cannibals use the makeshift key from the opening sequence to pick the lock, as soon as Kyle falls asleep...wait, FALLS ASLEEP?? While guarding 3 lunatics who slaughtered and ate your friends?

The girls finally get what they need, then see a cannibal wandering around out of the cell, with a pillowcase over his head. It's Kyle of course, and after they kill him and remove his "mask", they discover that his tongue was removed, which was why he sounded like the killers.

The girls find an escape tunnel, but Jenna gets disemboweled by the drill that was used earlier on McQuaid's door. The last 3 girls(Kenia, Bridget and Sara are chased through the snow by a mutant on one of the snowmobiles, and Bridget is pinned underneath the vehicle, which shreds her to death.

Lauren freezes to death after an injury forces her to rest against a tree. Then Kenia and Sara manage to steal back a snowmobile and ride away. As they laugh and cheer("Yay! Our friends are all dead, but we got away!"), both are beheaded by a thin strip of barbwire. Apparently the cannibals are big fans of 2001 Maniacs...Three-Finger tosses the heads into the tow truck he drove in the first film, and the 3 cannibals drive off into the proverbial sunset. THE END

Boy howdy, this one was a mixed bag. The kills were better than most of the ones in the preceding sequels(this was a prequel), but the acting was borderline unwatchable. And the plot was paper-thin. I'll give this one 3.5 killer trees out of 5, for at least not being too dull in the action department.

And what did I discover while watching Wrong Turn 4?

-Electricity is not a toy!

-People who have their skin ripped open and their limbs torn off live for a long time.

-Cannibals watch other cannibals in movies to get ideas from them.

No clue when my next movie will arrive, as Ballbuster seems to take their sweet time getting them mailed out. If it does arrive during the week, I'll be watching Maniac Cop. If not, I'll have to see what I can scrounge up. Until then....