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Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead - Unrated
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (9th November 2009). |
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The Film
 Horror movie sequels never cease to amaze me. From a business side, they’re some of the most profitable in the industry, especially in the direct-to-disc market that runs on a shoestring budget to large success because of the ‘hey, why not?’ logic that inspires sales and rentals. What’s really nice about the never in theatres sequels is that they have more room to play around in; no MPAA standards to worry about appealing to, you can kind of just go crazy. And “Wrong Turn 2: Dead End” (2007) took that standard with pride, having fun and making a quality movie in the process. But like any good horror series, it left you with a cliffhanger: one of the nastiest looking babies I’ve seen this side of “Eraserhead” (1977). So of course, my instinct is to eagerly await what happens to that freaky little 3-toed mutant baby with the next “Wrong Turn” installment. Somehow “Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead” botches a good thing, leaving “Wrong Turn 2: Dead End” director Joe Lynch for Declan O’Brien and plummeting from the heights that the second movie accomplished. The earliest warning sign comes as the case proudly announces O’Brien ‘Sci-Fi Channel Movie Veteran,’ but there’s still some fun to be had with this movie. The opening scenes remind me a huge deal of “Friday the 13th” (2009), by beginning with four twenty to thirty something year olds who are out looking for a good time, and a little gratuitous nudity. Unfortunately a crazed cannibal mutant hillbilly of the mill area spots them and quickly takes them out with only one survivor managing to escape into the woods. At the same time, a prison transfer for big criminal Chavez (Tamer Hassan) has been arranged to keep him from escaping. Under the oversight of Corrections Officer Nate Wilson (Tom Frederic), the transfer of the prisoners goes to plan until the mutant cannibal tips over their truck and kills one of the other officers. Wilson, Chavez and the other prisioners manage to escape and run in to Alex (Janet Montgomery), the survivor of the nudity filled river rafting trip, but they are all forced to trudge through the woods by Chavez who has managed to take control of the guns the guards had, all while being chased by the psychobilly mutant. The easiest thing to criticize in the movie would be the budget, and at a million dollars, it looks about the right price. While there are some good practical effects thrown into the mix, there is a huge amount of blatantly bad and obvious CG and greenscreen work in the movie, but that almost makes it more fun. I have to applaud O’Brien’s and screenwriter Connor James Delaney’s writing in one respect; some of the kills in this movie are pretty hilarious and bring you along for the ride. At times it’s because of the bad CG, such as when one of the prisoners is dragged behind the tow truck the lighting is so poor and the effects work is so obvious, it had me laughing and begging for a bit more. Other than kills though the writing is really dumb, to put it bluntly, and the actors don’t do much better. One of the most obvious things about all the actors are their poor American accents, they couldn’t quite get their vowels or slangology right. Hassan is British, of Turkish descent, and has no idea what the proper pronuncitation of the Spanish curse words his character is supposed to use, often yelling ‘Poodough’ when I’m guessing he’s trying to say ‘puto’ or ‘puta’ to insult his enemies. Much of the cast sounds fairly British underneath some bad American accents, along with a few ambiguously European accents and it almost adds to the fun, but after a while it gets annoying. It also doesn’t help that their dialogue by Delaney is terribly bad, funny bad in a few instances, but just plain bad for the most part. Above all this movie doesn’t deliver on the second movie’s cliffhanger. There’s a freaky mutant child at one point in the movie, but he is incredibly easily killed early on and just doesn’t look as freaky as he should. That baby was scary. Plain disgusting. This toddler? I guess he grew into his nasty face and deformed hands, because he looks way too normal. And then we don’t even get to see the kid do anything, he gets trapped and decapitated off camera about 30 minutes in and totally kills the good feelings left over from the second. Yet for what it is, this movie is a good, dumb, horror movie. The plot? Who needs it, it doesn’t make much sense anyways, especially at the end that throws in a new mutant just for the sake of maybe getting a fourth movie. Acting and directing are equally bad, but if you can get into it with a few friends and maybe even a few drinks, “Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead” could be well worth your time. Just yell at the screen, laugh at the bad dialogue and acting, and just have fun with it.
Video
While the film is on a budget, it’s interesting to see these low budget direct to Blu-ray movies coming out. The film is presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 1080p 24/fps transfer with AVC MPEG-4 encoding @ 22 MBPS, which could mean good things, but with the million dollar budget it doesn’t fare too well. There’s grain in the footage, even some interlacing problems that I didn’t think could exist on Blu-ray. Yet it’s still watchable and mostly clear, with some big problems that will pop up occasionally, but this cheap sort of digital production helps make the movie a little funnier for me.
Audio
Like the video, the audio has some big problems here and there but manages to make for an overall mediocre transfer. It could have been fine with the English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track mixed at 48kHz/24-bit that seems to be fairly standard for Blu-ray, but the sound effects are cheesy and seem to pop out of the mastering, as do some of the music and dialogue in the film. I would say most of the transfer problems trace back to the original mastering as the biggest problems are balance and movement of the tracks in the film. Also included are French and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 tacks with English for the hearing impaired, Spanish, Portuguese, Cantonese, Mandarin and Korean subtitles.
Extras
There are only 2 major special features on the disc, a 3-part making-of featurette along with some deleted scenes, there are also bonus trailers. “Wrong Turn 3 In 3 Fingers… I Mean, Parts” is the main featurette, playable together for 18 minutes and 8 seconds or in pieces, described below: - “Action, Gore and Chaos!” runs for 9 minutes and 10 seconds. This featurette speaks mostly with Declan O’Brien to talk about how the movie was put together, between coordinating locations and stunts. There’s a good amount of time spent going through the effects behind the scenes, with some glimpses of the set with footage and production photos. You also get to hear some of the real accents of the actors and it just makes their American accents all the more laughable. Not a bad featurette with some of the effects and a fine look at the film for what it is. - “Brothers in Blood” runs for 5 minutes and 24 seconds. Everyone talks about their backgrounds and coming together to work on the film, though there’s no mention of their accents. Much of it focuses on the chain gang aspect of the movie and how the cast dealt with it, leading to large amounts of praise from everyone for everyone else. - “Three Finger’s Fight Night” runs for 3 minutes and 34 seconds and deals with the final fight between Chavez and Three Finger near the end of the film, again delving into behind-the-scenes footage along with choreographing the fight. I didn’t mention it in the review, but the fight is really slow and laughable in the movie, so seeing them praise it here and trying to film it in full motion along with the talk of improvising the fights make sense for how funny the movie ends up looking. Finally are the deleted scenes, which run all together for 1 minute and 24 seconds. There are really only two scenes the Sheriff looking for his dog only to be startled by a hawk and followed by Three Finger, while the other is the deputy getting bound in barb wire by Three finger. Bonus trailers are: - “The Marine 2” runs for 37 seconds. - “Sons of Anarchy” runs for 53 seconds. - “Wrong Turn 2: Dead End” runs for 41 seconds.
Overall
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