Reviewed by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars Tom Frederic, Janet Montgomery, Tamer Hassan, Borislav Iliev | Written by Connor James Delaney
UK certification 18 | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 88 minutes | Directed by Declan O'Brien
Having loved Joe Lynch's Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, not to mention preferring it to the 2003 original, which I also very much enjoyed, I was looking forward to the third installment, but unfortunately I was left disappointed.
Sequels are supposed to be bigger and better. You're supposed to step up to the plate with sequels and put things up a notch, especially with the conflict. In the first two films, there are many of the bloodthirsty cannibal hillbillies, but in Left for Dead there is only one, the returning Three-Finger. Not only is Three-Finger the only horribly disfigured threat to our good guys, but the studio slashed the budget to just $1 million and shot it in cheap-to-shoot Bulgaria, with substandard British actors in American roles!
Where Wrong Turn 2 was fun, 3 takes itself too seriously, and comes off looking far too worse for wear with the inclusion of the hokey performances and awful CGI. I've honestly had it up to here with cheap digital gore effects. Practical is the only way to go in horror. If you can't do it in camera, don't do it at all. I really would have enjoyed the film a lot more if the bloodshed was done practically. With regards to the acting, the English accents come through so much that for the most part the performances are cringe-worthy.
The story of Left for Dead surrounds a group of prisoners being transferred to a new institution, but when their bus is ran off the road by the dreaded Three-Finger, all bloody hell breaks loose and the police are taken hostage by the convicts, which leads to the axe-wielding hillbilly getting his fix of hunting humans and ripping them apart in all sorts of gruesome ways. It's definitely the weakest of the trilogy, by quite a long way in my eyes — with a silly twist that you can smell from a mile away to boot — but with the film becoming an instant commercial success in the States, it probably won't be too long before Wrong Turn 4 gets the green light, and when that happens, they've really got a lot of work to do to return to the standard set by the first two films.
EXTRAS ★★ Three making-of features and deleted scenes.