Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead DVD Review

People who like horror stories will like Wrong Turn 3: Left For Dead, released on DVD October 10th by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. Everyone else will be able to take it or leave it. Kayaking, a display of gratuitous sex, and the introduction of Three Finger (Boris Iliev), a mutant cannibal, lead Alex (Janet Montgomery) away from her vacationing college group to where a band of cops and prisoners are roaming the night after a bus breakdown.

Of course all the good guys and the bad guys are plucked off one-by-one down to their core, which includes Little Nate (Tom Frederick, a cop on the last night and day before his retirement). (The crew, which we find out in Special Features is mostly British, is not so much composed of bad actors but actors who can project primary characters with whom people can or can’t identify with – not a full range of acting!) There is a minor cult following for the Wrong Turn movies (and the quality of the movies themselves has varied widely).

Nate also finds bags of money on the bus and forces each cop and prisoner to carry two. He states, “It’s ironic, money. I struggle my whole life to put myself in a position to make good. Now I’m holding more money in my hands than I’d ever need and all I want to do is get rid of it.”

This is NOT a film to watch with the family (for sex, plot and language) but, rather, an unrated horror cultist’s delight. It was shot in 24 days on a very sparse budget and director Declan O’Brien wanted to keep all the gore from the first two movies and create more. At one point he had a steel railing in front of a bus he was going to blow up, late at night, and realized that because it WAS steel it probably wouldn’t budge, so he had to dig it out before the explosion! Also he initiated 4 AM dancing sessions to pep up the actors and keep them going!

I once asked an old friend why people liked horror movies and he said that it was to give us a permissible place in which to be scared. The three-finger cannibal in this movie is certainly scary (he pops a real human eye into his mouth and chews it casually). The attempt to continue making movies scary in this era is difficult because of the plethora of prosthetics and other special effects, but as I heard Jay Leno saying on TV recently, “The scariest movies are the ones without the monsters – the HUMANS are the monsters!”

Grade: C

Director: Declan O’Brien
Starring: Tom Frederick, Janet Montgomery, Boris Iliev, Tom Hassan and Tom McKay

DVD Review by Christina of Movie Room Reviews