Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines (2012)

Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines arrives as the fifth entry in a franchise that has never pretended to be anything other than a delivery system for gore, and it honors that contract with grim efficiency. A small West Virginia town prepares for its Mountain Man Festival, a cluster of college students wanders into the path of the Hillicker clan, and the evening proceeds toward dismemberment. There is no thesis here, no argument about how we ought to live. The cannibals are cannibals. The woods are woods. The snowblower does what a snowblower does.

The closest thing to a progressive gesture is Sheriff Angela Carter, a woman with a badge, a shotgun, and the will to fight. She holds authority for a while. Then the film ties her to a ceiling and offers her a choice between burning and a self-inflicted shotgun blast, a fate that no thesis survives. We are left with standard slasher arithmetic, in which the final girl is blinded and dragged into the trees. A power plant is sabotaged, plunging the town into darkness, but the outage exists to enable mayhem, not to lecture us about the grid. Nobody in Fairlake has time for a lesson.

The cast is white, the kills are plentiful, and the moral universe is flat. This is a film with no interest in representation, no interest in class, no interest in the climate, and no interest in telling us how to feel about any of it. It simply wants to show us a man being run over by a pickup truck. On the scale of contemporary social consciousness, it registers as a void, which is its own kind of honesty. It is cheap, dumb, and not remotely scary, and it knows it.

Thematic tags: sequel (fifth installment in the Wrong Turn series, direct continuation of the prequel thread). No Oscar wins, no remake, no true story, no book source, no superheroes, and no domestic box office crown for a direct-to-video release.

{"review": "Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines arrives as the fifth entry in a franchise that has never pretended to be anything other than a delivery system for gore, and it honors that contract with grim efficiency. A small West Virginia town prepares for its Mountain Man Festival, a cluster of college students wanders into the path of the Hillicker clan, and the evening proceeds toward dismemberment. There is no thesis here, no argument about how we ought to live. The cannibals are cannibals. The woods are woods. The snowblower does what a snowblower does.\n\nThe closest thing to a progressive gesture is Sheriff Angela Carter, a woman with a badge, a shotgun, and the will to fight. She holds authority for a while. Then the film ties her to a ceiling and offers her a choice between burning and a self-inflicted shotgun blast, a fate that no thesis survives. We are left with standard slasher arithmetic, in which the final girl is blinded and dragged into the trees. A power plant is sabotaged, plunging the town into darkness, but the outage exists to enable mayhem, not to lecture us about the grid. Nobody in Fairlake has time for a lesson.\n\nThe cast is white, the kills are plentiful, and the moral universe is flat. This is a film with no interest in representation, no interest in class, no interest in the climate, and no interest in telling us how to feel about any of it. It simply wants to show us a man being run over by a pickup truck. On the scale of contemporary social consciousness, it registers as a void, which is its own kind of honesty. It is cheap, dumb, and not remotely scary, and it knows it.", "thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}