Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines  ★★

MY recent detour into Wrong Turn franchise territory looks to have hit a dead-end.

Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines is the weakest yet.

The set-up is lazy, the effects and make-up poor and the acting sub-standard.

The only thing it does have in its favour is the progression of the story to become a kind of modern western, ala John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, with the sheriff having to enlist volunteers to help defend a police station.

That comparison is giving the film more credit than it deserves because the town centre where the main action occurs looks like it was shot on a sound-stage rather than on location.

The entire film has a cheap, tele-visual look that reflects the usual deterioration of a series into straight-to-video territory.

The story? Well we join a new group of young adults camping in West Virginia where our deformed, cannibalistic family of hillbilly killers are located.

This time they are going to a music festival in the small town of Fairlake where, as legend has it, the entire population ‘disappeared’ in 1817, supposedly taken and murdered by the hillbillies.

This is ultimately lazy and unnecessary because all it does is tenuously explain why some people might be wandering around town wearing deformed hillbilly masks.

The film’s makers may have thought they had scored a small coup with the casting of Doug Bradley, who plays Pinhead in the Hellraiser film series, as the estranged father of the deformed killers, but he is one of the worst overacting offenders.

Unfortunately, as a completist, I will eventually be compelled to watch part 6, but I’m not looking forward to the experience.