WRONG TURN 4: BLOODY BEGINNINGS

Mountains of West Virginia. In 1974, the patients of the Glenville sanatorium manage to free themselves and, under the guidance of three deformed and cannibalistic brothers, commit a massacre among the doctors and staff of the facility.\n2003. A group of friends decides to spend a weekend in a mountain chalet. On their snowmobiles, the young people are surprised by a snowstorm that forces them to stop at the Glenville sanatorium for the night, a building now unused for nearly 30 years. After the first hours devoted to partying, the young people will soon have to face the masters of the house, namely the three cannibal brothers, former patients now grown and hungry.\n\nThe cannibal mutants of West Virginia are back, more unleashed than ever in "Wrong Turn 4 - The Mountain of the Mad", prequel to the slasher-splatter saga inaugurated in 2003 with the film directed by Rob Schmidt and produced by the late Stan Winston.\nThe good film by Schmidt, in an unexpected way, gave rise to a saga that does not seem intended to stop and has found a stable audience in home video. The first sequel, "Wrong Turn 2 - Dead End" arrives in 2007 and in a cheerful gut-fest easily entertains and\nentertains, although showing all the poverty of the production and a lack of ideas already concerning. Third chapter in 2009, "Wrong Turn 3 - Left Turn", and a small step back (just barely, eh) for a saga that nevertheless maintains itself at average levels of low-cost entertainment. Now comes this fourth chapter that actually tells us the origins of the mutant family, a prequel that bears the signature of Declan O'Brian, already responsible for "Wrong Turn 3" and that, as expected, maintains that qualitative stagnation of the saga.\n"Wrong Turn 4 - The Mountain of the Mad" is neither more nor less what one could expect and respects the canons of the two previous chapters: blood, sex, and monsters, in a slasher formula as worn out as now effective for fans.\nLet's start with the points in favor of the film.\nThe prologue set in 1974 (a topical year for rural slasher since it saw the birth of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Will it be a coincidence?) is not bad at all. We are shown the three\ncannibal mutants of Rob Schmidt's film as children and their murderous fury unleashes in a sanatorium. After the escape, on the notes of "On the Beautiful Blue Danube" by Strauss, the massacre unfolds that recalls another prologue, that of "The Haunting of Hill House", and proceeds fiercely bloody among "first" cannibal banquets, lethal electro-shocks, and a splatterosissimo dismemberment with barbed wire. Good idea to take up the three redneck assassins of the first film, after the change in the second film and the partial recovery in the third, with a look this time almost identical to that of the progenitor.\nObviously excellent the dose of splatter and gore, returned almost entirely to the right path of live tricks after the misstep of computer graphics in chapter 3. Among decapitations, ferocious stabbings, chest perforations with a snow drill, and "passage" with snowmobile, the\npeak is\nreached in the banquet scene, with the victim cut into pieces and cooked alive! Good also the necessary dose of sex, which this time is entrusted almost entirely to the lesbian couple Tenika Davis and Kaitlyn Wong, who do not skimp on hot scenes.\nOkay, the positive elements end here and everything else is almost disarming.\nThe thing that first catches the eye of the viewer is the idiocy with which the characters have been described and built. Usually, the "positive" protagonists of slasher films do not shine for intelligence and are mostly unlikable and destined for the slaughterhouse. But in "Wrong Turn 4", unimaginable heights are reached. Nine characters (too many for a film of this kind) who, in addition to being all the same in appearance (the girls are super hot, the guys are tall, muscular, and have fashionable hair) and in characterization, say and do so many stupidities that their mental health is questionable. To give some examples: outside there is the snowstorm, they are in a spacious and unheated place and they complain about the cold... but what do they do? They obviously go around bare-chested or in a tank top! Then, they managed to capture after a thousand mishaps the three monsters and the "tough" one who offers to watch them after two minutes what does he do? He falls asleep! Or, the survivors manage to escape from the sanatorium and while fleeing in the snow trying to lose the monsters one of them says: "I lost the fireplace iron, I have to go back to look for it!" That is, they are a step away from salvation with the bad guys at their heels and they think about going to look for something in the snow an useless weapon. There would be more to add but I stop here, the idea is made.\nWell-deserved slap on the back of the neck for Declan O'Brian, therefore, who in addition to directing writes the film in total approximation, demonstrating that "Wrong Turn 4" was made hastily with the sole idea of making a prequel and surpassing itself in terms of splatter.\nK.O. also for what concerns the locations, because from the suggestive woods we move to an anonymous psychiatric hospital like a thousand other slashers. The intention to vary the location is appreciable (moreover, setting everything in the winter period with the snow!) but the places have not been exploited to the fullest and the same sanatorium, so unrealistically clean and orderly after 30 years of hypothetical disuse, does not unsettle even a little bit.\nIn short, between predictable highs and lows, "Wrong Turn 4 - The Mountain of the Mad" is watched and forgotten with complete tranquility. Soup for splatter fans (and the saga in question), soggy bread for everyone else.