Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead. 2009. Directed by Declan O’Brien. Screenplay by Connor James Delaney, based on characters by Alan McElroy. Starring Tom Frederic, Janet Montgomery, Gil Kolirin, Christian Contreras, Jake Curran, Tom McKay, Charles Venn, Tamer Hassan, Jack Gordon, and Borislav Iliev.
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.
Unrated. 92 minutes.
Horror

★1/2 I don’t like to specifically rag on a director because directing can be tough, although, that’s what critiquing is all about in the end. Declan O’Brien doesn’t exactly have the greatest track record when it comes to his filmography as a director. He’s done a lot of sequels, including Joy Ride 3, plus Sharktopus, as well as both Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings and Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines. Now, while I do actually enjoy the 4th film of this series, I can’t say I like the 5th, and that brings me to Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead.
What a pile this movie is, if it weren’t for a half decent performance from a couple people and at least a different story than the usual “people wander into the deep woods and get murdered by cannibals”, then this would be completely useless in every single way. Not that it’s good, at all, but at least it has one or two small redeeming qualities amongst the garbage.
The third film in the Wrong Turn series begins with the obligatory opening scene of people being killed, only this time a girl survives and runs off. Meanwhile, a notorious prisoner is being transported by some prison guards, along with several other inmates, and on the way they are thrown off course, their bus crashes, and the guards are then at the mercy of the criminals. Then come the inbred cannibals, raving from the woods, shooting arrows from bows and throwing knives and generally destroying anything and anyone who comes across their path. The surviving girl from the beginning meets up with the guards and the inmates, then they all try to survive the woods together, as the cannibal brothers descend upon them with blood and madness and murder.Right off the bat there’s needless nudity, and I’m not someone who needs to get my daily fill of breasts on film, thank you very much. Sure, if there’s some reason calling for a little bit of nudity, that’s fine, but I’ve got no time for horror movies that try to fill time with naked women. There are some 1980s horrors I don’t mind even though there’s a bit of shameless nudity, because there was a certain charm to slashers from that era that had the whole “don’t have sex or do drugs or drink or you’re dead” thing going on. I just think nowadays it’s a bit tired, and the opening scene here was not called for, no need.
Then there’s an awful bit of CGI for a kill in that beginning scene that was just… whoa. Brutal. Funny because afterwards it looked like practical effects, and yet the kill itself, as a guy literally tears apart, looked to be terrible graphics. It was laughable, I actually cracked up. One of the things I loved about Wrong Turn and Wrong Turn 2: Dead End was the fact they did some great gory stuff with practical effects, you got to see good blood and guts and it looked plausible. This one gag just throws all that out the window. They obviously used some practical stuff in the aftermath of that kill, or at least it looked that way, so it boggles my mind why they couldn’t manage to pull the whole kill off that way. We’ll never know.
There only comes more terribly done kills, for the most part anyways. There’s a horrid face-cutting kill that just blew me away how wretched the effects were and how fake they looked. Very few effects are decent – one knife to the side of a prison guard’s neck is done well, even though it’s not super gory or anything too extreme; it went off well enough to be enjoyed, for a brief instant anyways. The most decent bit of blood was when the cannibals hooked the loudmouth prisoner with all sorts of barbed wire and hauled him off, and even that wasn’t too special.
I can’t recommend this at all. I gave it 1.5 out of 5 stars because there are at least a couple actors who aren’t complete rubbish, even if the dialogue is crap for the most part. Not all the performances were good, and none of them were great. At least the main guards were all right, a few of the prisoners were annoying, but overall it could have been much worse. The acting gets worse and worse as the whole series goes on. Stay away from this one. Most people hate all the rest, I actually enjoy part of the next entry – Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings. That being said, from here on in none of the films measure up to the first two in the series, so proceed with caution; you won’t be too enticed by any of the films that follow this one, even if I do enjoy the next instalment.