October 14th - IN A VIOLENT NATURE's low audience scores are pretty funny, as you can just imagine someone checking this out based on its premise - a superhuman killer rises from his grave to graphically murder horny teenagers staying at a cabin in the woods - and expecting a gore fest full of obligatory topless actresses, and instead getting a series of long third person tracking shots of a mute lummox walking in a straight line from one graphic murder to another that so bores and enrages them that they immediately take to Google to give a one-star review.
Telling the non-existent story of a slasher movie from the antagonist's point of view is putting a spin on a formula/genre with a notoriously unforgiving and unimaginative audience - I should know, I used to be one of them - that just wants gore, dang it, and preferably with action narrated by characters so I can look at my phone while I watch it, but this was a hoot even if I can see why it was polorising for horror audiences. The long, static shots of the zombie killer are meant to evoke the sense of a documentary, while commenting on the voyeuristic nature of the slasher genre, probably, but I just thought it was funny that it made a guy getting graphically dismembered by an industrial saw look so perfunctory.
October 15th - TAROT is hilariously bad, especially after watching these tropes and scenes inverted in In A Violent Nature, because if you view this as a parody, it actually becomes incredibly entertaining, its constant reliance on actors in spooky makeup coming towards the screen in jump-cuts while going "ooga booga" eliciting delight rather than my usual weary cynicism. I can only remember one film - Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor - being so terrible it became an entertaining parody of itself, so Tarot is already in auspicious company.
October 16th - STING is a creature feature done well, and sometimes that's all you want in the spooky season. Events take place in a Tim Burton-esque working class tenement block as an alien spider slowly grows in size and potential danger after being adopted by a lonely child as a pet. Maybe a bit meat-and-potatoes for some viewers, but if you're indulgent, there's plenty to like.
October 17th - WRONG TURN is not the film I thought it would be, as I thought it was a film about horny teens being driven off the road by highway robbers or something, but the premise is far more whack-a-doodle than that, centring on the murderous intentions of a family of deformed mutant hillbilly cannibals who are more akin to goblins than anything else. Having said that, it's all very straight-faced stuff despite its audacious premise, but well-made and performed. Having seen it once, I don't see any need to revisit it ever again why yes this is a setup for me watching every film in the series, why do you ask?
October 18th - WRONG TURN 2 features a bit where an inbred hillbilly teenager jacks off while watching a topless sunbather, so his sister becomes jealous of the sunbather and murders her with a knife and cuts her face off, then the hillbilly sister wears it while she has sex with her brother. This sequel looks abominably cheap and thrown-together compared to the first movie, but dang it, there is just something oddly affecting by how hard it tries to be gross - it just puts in the effort to be genuinely disgusting, and I respect that.
Telling the story of a reality tv show - just in case you forget it was the mid-2000s - that gets hijacked by a hillbilly murder rampage, the film becomes an exaggerated metaphor for the tensions between urban and rural America, with privileged city dwellers out of their element and unprepared to face the brutal realities of the rural, impoverished settings they stumble into, the rural hillbilly killers representing a grotesque inversion of the "American dream," living outside the law and social norms, but also some people get totally mashed up in a meat grinder - it's pretty rad if you like that sort of thing.
Really cheap-looking, but like I say, it puts the effort in.
October 20th - WRONG TURN 3 is even cheaper-looking than the last entry in the series, and the law of diminishing returns is definitely kicking in, with the flesh-eating hillbillies turning their attentions to a bus load of escaped convicts and their hostages. It's kinda sucky, to be honest, and even the odd moment of inventive gore can't hold the attention during what is pretty much just some stock characters titting about in the woods at night.
WRONG TURN 4 sees the series smash the "reboot" button with a prequel set in a remote insane asylum where some horny teens seek refuge from a snowstorm. Predictable, but has a funny ending that is likely not worth sitting through the rest of the film to see.
October 21st - WRONG TURN 5 chugs around and I swear, these films look cheaper with every new instalment, with this one being shot on what looks suspiciously like the set used to shoot multiple tv dramas set in small town America and it even features at least one member of the Hollyoaks cast. The woman playing the sheriff was a noted Shakespearian actress before taking this job, so... I can only conclude the Wrong Turn the title alludes to in this instalment is her career choices after she left the stage. This one sucks ass outright and I didn't like it at all, with a whole bunch of plot threads and elements introduced that go nowhere, with several characters just disappearing from the movie in the second act.
WRONG TURN 6 - I can't tell if this is another prequel or a reboot, but either way, it sucks. The hillbilly cannibals are now working in a remote hotel and incest as a plot point is back on the table, just not in a fun way like it was in Wrong Turn 2. This really is the lowest point of the series, and has pretty much nothing to redeem it. They could have maybe done something about the inherent class tension in the premise of evil hillbillies within the context of the posh hotel and the stock trader protagonists, but they give us nothing to work with beyond the hillbillies being a scathing denouncement of the white American working class. Yes, there is a scene where someone has a fire hose inserted into their bottom until their stomach explodes, but it's just not enough to save this turkey.
October 22nd - WRONG TURN: THE FOUNDATION is... surprisingly good. A self-contained film with a lot of polish and some good performances, it takes the basic premise of the series - city dwellers encountering brutal rural folk in the backwoods of the Appalachians - but goes in a different direction with it, leaning possibly a bit too literally into the series' roots in modern American folk horror. It was a pleasant surprise after the descent into aimless slop the series had become and I'll grant you that low expectations might have made me view it more favourably than I otherwise would have, though it still feels in retrospect like a solid wilderness survival thriller with horror overtones that I could recommend to others with a clear conscience.
October 23rd - CRITTERS ATTACK because yes, I can actually just watch the latest entry in a movie series without having to binge the entire series first - though in this instance, I shouldn't have bothered with watching just the latest entry in the canon, either. This is not a good instalment in a series that already had some pretty ropey offerings, but is a good example of how not picking a lane and sticking to it can ruin the story you're trying to tell. It's actually impressive that a comedy horror series can produce something where the horror and the comedy actually cancel each other out, but it's not really something the makers should be proud of, nor should they be proud of managing to make a fourth sequel to a four decades-old Gremlins knock-off look even cheaper and more thrown-together than usual.
October 24th - CATNADO is a bravura and self-explanatory one-word title/premise, but sadly the execution doesn't live up to it. An anthology of terror tales connected by the titular freak weather event, there isn't the mix of styles and narrative voices one might expect of something this low-budget and everything looks like something shot during lockdown by budding actors on their phones. I wouldn't be so mean as to call it terrible, but I think I am actually over cats now. That's what this film did to me.
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