WRONG TURN 5: BLOODLINES

West Virginia. A group of young people on Halloween decide to participate in the annual Mountain Man Festival held in a remote town where, in 1814, all its inhabitants mysteriously disappeared. Soon after, Three Finger and his two deformed brothers, this time led by their new "adoptive father," will be on their trail. The "Wrong Turn" saga continues, and after releasing two sequels and a prequel to the first chapter by Rob Schmidt in 2003, it now arrives at its fifth episode, which is a sequel to the prequel, "Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings." The film in question maintains the same director as its predecessor, Declan O'Brien, who seems to want to distance himself from what can be defined as the first trilogy to propose a slightly different plot, giving the idea of having decided to start his own saga with the previous chapter. As early as number 4, there was a certain tendency on the part of our beloved deformed cannibals towards an attitude that began to mix "Saw" with typical psychotic families like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or "The Hills Have Eyes," an attitude that is fully confirmed and consolidated here. Surely the brand needed a real makeover after the gradual mediocrity it was falling into, but this, in the end, turns out to be the wrong path. First of all, a series of very sophisticated traps are inserted into a flawed narrative structure, since the killers find themselves, for the first time, not only acting in a real city but also racing against time (or at least that's what it should be) when they decide to eliminate their victims with highly intricate and carefully designed death machines. Another novelty that we are presented with is that our three are led (the reason is not explained and it would also be hard to do so) by a man wanted by the law for 30 years, who has "adopted" them, moving them from the psychiatric hospital where they lived into his home, a choice that ends up putting the "little brothers" in the background, making them mere executors without any personality or characterization and making them look like underlings. It is also pointless in this type of films to dwell on the narrative choices that the characters make; among all, we cite the "brilliant" choice of the sheriff who, left alone in the city (on the walkie-talkie one of his men does not respond for hours because a girl drags him into the car starting to have sex with him for no apparent reason) decides, after a murder, to entrust police rifles to a drunk and two twenty-year-old boys, one of whom is accused of assault and drug possession. Technically, the only negative note is the makeup of Three Finger and company, absolutely grotesque and at times ridiculous (not surprisingly, their faces in the film are often mistaken for masks). That said, this new title also has good reasons to be seen, such as the cleverly gory scenes that are quite fun and splatter (note the scene with the combine harvester, certainly impactful, and the one with the hammer blows) for which it was wisely decided to limit the use of CGI Animation and return to handcrafted effects that always work well. Some scenes of tension are also successfully pulled off. The level of the actors is typical of a second-rate TV movie with the classic cast of inexpressive handsome faces, including the beautiful but not equally convincing Roxanne McKee (the series "Game of Thrones"), Camilla Arfwedson ("The Duchess") in the role of the sheriff, and, in the role of the wanted man, Doug Bradley (already known as Pinhead from the "Hellraiser" saga) who, while excelling over the rest of the cast, is the typical villain who says mean things and laughs instead of being scared, limiting himself to the role assigned to him. In essence, the good Declan O'Brien has the merit here of having led the "Wrong Turn" saga out of the swamp it had gotten stuck in by trying new paths, giving us the third best title in the series (after the fourth and the first). But the flaws are still many, and a direction of this kind certainly does not make one's mouth water for the next, highly probable sequels.