Let's just say this up front: Wrong Turn 5 is certainly the worst entry in what's arguably the worst horror franchise of the past decade. If you value your time and money, you shouldn't even finish reading to the bottom of this paragraph. Forget that Wrong Turn 5 exists. Spend your hard-earned, entertainment-earmarked cash elsewhere. Buy some Christmas gifts instead. Donate money to the organizations assisting those in the NY area after hurricane Sandy. Stock up on provisions for the next storm. You get the idea—anything but this.
 
Because this movie doesn't respect you, as an audience, it doesn't respect the few fans of the series who are inexplicably left, and, most damningly, it has no respect for itself. Wrong Turn 5 exists for no other reason than to sucker people into buying it. Those that fall for this ruse—noticing the "ALL NEW MOVIE!" sticker on the front, and the slipcover, giving the illusion of a high-profile release—will receive a tedious hour and a half of awful acting, cheap-looking sets, cruelty-for-the-sake-of-cruelty, and a bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping premise that the movie doesn't even have the budget to fully realize. Is there gore? Sure. Gratuitous sex? Of course. But even those who set the lowest bar for horror movie enjoyment will be baffled by Wrong Turn 5's indifference to its own awfulness.
 
So, what happens this time around? Suprise! Horny, drugged up college kids get picked off one by one. The cardboard cutout twenty-somethings have traveled to the rural small town of Fairlake for the annual "Mountain Man Festival," a music fest that—as one reporter tells us—"rivals Coachella and Lollapalooza." Riiiiight. We never see the festival or the crowds. At most, we get thirty-odd extras wandering about an extremely fake-looking city block set, dressed up like Deliverance rejects. On the way to the festival, the kids crash their BMW swerving to avoid Maynard (Hellraiser's Doug Bradley), a redneck standing in the middle of the road, and when the hillbilly pulls a knife on them, the guys kick him to the asphalt and give him a beatdown they'll come to regret. Sheriff Angela (Camilla Arfwedson) arrives on the scene conveniently quickly, arresting everyone and holding them in the town's jail. She lets out most of the kids because they ask nicely, while noble Billy (Simon Ginty) stays behind, taking the rap for the enormous bag of drugs stashed in the car. Threatening Billy and the sheriff from his cell, Doug Bradley seems to be doing a piss-poor impersonation of Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, and his Maynard promises that before the night is over, death will come to them all.
 
See, Maynard is somehow related to ol' One Eye, Saw Tooth, and Three Finger, the incest-addled, impervious-to-pain Appalachian brothers we've grown to be bored with over the course of the quickly withering Wrong Turn series. These aren't cinematic villains; they're bad actors in what might as well be cheap rubber Halloween masks, and they're far more obnoxious than scary. The slack-jawed lunatics cut the power to town, pull down the cellphone tower, and spend the next forty-five minutes antagonizing the college students, some of whom have shacked up in a cheap motel while the others idiotically wander the blacked-out streets. Well, street, singular. One girl gets her intestines fed to her. A drunk gets roasted inside an oil drum. Two guys are pulped to gory pieces on a soccer field by a tilling machine. And then there's the Rio Bravo-style hold-down-the-fort subplot, which doesn't even try to be tense. None of this is remotely thrilling or terrifying or even visually interesting.
 
The movie isn't so-bad-it's-good bad, or even just bad bad. It's aggressively unbearable. You know that feeling when, as a kid, your mom would get on your case about cleaning your room, so you'd do it, but angrily, begrudgingly, slamming dresser drawers and kicking your toys under your bed? Well, that's what Wrong Turn 5 feels like. It gets the job done spitefully, carelessly, with no joy or self-satisfaction. The story is rote, the gore is routine, the tone is callous and un-fun.
 
Even being Blu-ray there is nothing positive to say about the movie. The video and audio quality lack any sense of production, or effort. As for extras, there is an audio commentary by Declan O'Brien, the director and behind-the-scene producer of the movie,
A Day in the Death: Some video diary-type BTS footage shot by the film's cast. Hillbilly Kills: The film's director and producer discuss the kills, some of which were apparently inspired by Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. Director's Die-aries: More behind the scenes footage, shot by the director.
 
Friends don't let friends waste their time on miserable straight-to-video horror sequel cash-ins. Wrong Turn 5 isn't just the worst film in a franchise that probably shouldn't have inspired any follow-ups, it's also on the short list of bad films for 2012. You'd be better actually visiting the Appalachians than watching this film's paltry excuse for hill-billy insanity.