And away we go. The Wrong Turn series, while being majorly shit, save for 2012's version, is sort of the signal to me that it's time to start Horror Fest. What is Horror Fest you ask? Well it's a period from mid October till about mid November where I binge on horror movies, some good, some fun, and some shit. I started it a few years back and to not do it would feel like something was missing from life. So no matter what my state of mind, no matter if I'm down in the dumps, sad, or just generally bored with life, Horror Fest is my way of getting in the Holiday spirit. So join me on my journey, wont you?
The Wrong Turn series, up until #5, had been a rather dreadful franchise. The original, starring Eliza Dushku was fair. The next three straight to video releases were horrid, and then out of the blue #5 was a damn good movie. I sort of wish they had stopped there and not tempted fate, but here we are. After taking a year off, Wrong Turn returns with the 6th installment in the series. Will it be as shitty as the 2nd, 3rd and 4th? Or will it keep the momentum of the solid fifth movie?
Well...I can't say that it was uninteresting. Can't really say that it was all that good either, but it had it's moments. I wouldn't call it convoluted, but it certainly seemed to be overly ambitious in it's premise.
A group of twenty somethings, our lead among them, are headed to the back woods where he's inherited an old spa in the middle of nowhere. The back story among the friends is pretty damn silly and verbose. See, the lead worked on Wall Street at some point, then he had a meltdown, lost every ones money, and then tried to kill himself. These are the only people who stood by him. Except half of them still appear not to like him all that much. Add in the fact that the characters are completely stock, such as the pot head, the bitch, and the guy who runs around with a camera all the time, and you just have zero investment in them.
The tie in to the previous films is that the two people currently running the spa, a brother and sister, are sort of ringleaders for the hillbilly clan, and the guy who's inherited the spa is a long lost relative whose sperm is needed to help keep the family tree going, wretched as it may be.
There are some real nice kills and copious amounts of fun gore, including a poor bastard dying via fire hose in quite possibly the worst way to die via fire hose. The problem is that you have to watch a good amount of inane interaction between the characters before anything really starts to happen, and even when it does it's not very dramatic because who could give a fuck. Would it hurt a movie like this to just have a bunch of people who really like each other and are super cool and friendly with each other. It would certainly carry more emotional weight when they get disemboweled.
Four different chicks get a good amount of naked and they're all pretty hot, but something about the sex and nudity was just off. I dunno, the whole tone of the movie is all over the place and nothing really ever feels coherent enough to enjoy. The leads girlfriend and the sister who runs the spa are both gorgeous blondes and at the end of the day I was much more interested in seeing them naked than I was anything else the movie had to offer, and not just because I'm perpetually horny. Then when they do get naked I was kind of wishing they were in a movie that would utilize their nudity better. It's kind of like when an actor gives a great performance in a shitty movie, except the great performances here are boobies.
Anyway, Wrong Turn 6 has good tits and good gore, a few laughs and a nice wince here and there, but it's buried so deep in a world of characters and a story that are at once unoriginal and verbose, that it just never gains any traction. It doesn't help that the writers seem to veer from intricate to inane in their storytelling, not quite being able decipher one from the other.
There's enjoyment to be had here, and you probably wont feel like you've wasted your time watching it, but there's no particular reason to go out of your way to see it.
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