1 out of 5

Director: Declan O’Brien

After a pretty impressive and brutal beginning that seems to be true to the “Bloody Beginnings” tag – and apparently went through most of the budget – Wrong Turn 4 slips into a boringly typical and predictable combo of torture porn and dumb teen horror.  Declan O’Brien’s previous entry (WT3) wasn’t great by any means, but it at least strayed from annoying conventions and stuck, moreso, to just typical horror stupidity.  A minor difference and a minor reprieve, but it made it watchable.  After that intro – a bloody slaughtering at a sanatorium where, I suppose, some WT hillbilly kids are staying, and escaping, and killing – we go right to were WT3 started, with the prerequisite boobs (the blood already taken care of).  3 seemed to do this to get it out of the way, but maybe with Declan now writing the flick as well, he made the unwise decision to keep it in that mode, and so soon we’re on our way to “let’s all be teenageresque and go stay at an isolated lodge!”  Fine.  They get lost.  Fine.  They end up at the sanatorium.  Fine.  Cue sex and drugs, the sluts and the smart ones, and etc, before our hillbillies show up and this breed seems to take more pleasure in the torture than the trappin’ and eatin’.  There’s nothing new here, but you can’t really expect that – you’re just looking for distraction and blood.  But WT4 is more boring than it should be for some reason, maybe because that stylized intro ups things to a level that the rest of the film never achieves.  Kudos to the last-minute, which you have to expect from horror but was still funny, but otherwise this is such a snooze, and can’t even suffer up a better reason (like 3) for any of this to really be going on.