Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings (2011) Review - Its Great!

By the time Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings arrives, the franchise fully embraces what it has become: a relentless gore machine built around its monstrous trio of cannibal killers.

Directed by Declan O’Brien, this entry acts as a prequel, taking audiences back to the early days of the infamous mutant brothers—Three Finger, Saw Tooth, and One Eye—and the chaos that surrounded their escape from captivity.

The film opens inside a West Virginia sanitarium, where the deformed siblings are being held as dangerous patients. Predictably, it doesn’t take long before things spiral into violence and the brothers break free, unleashing a bloodbath that sets the tone for everything that follows.

Years later, a group of college friends snowmobiling through the mountains make the classic horror movie mistake: they seek shelter in the very same abandoned asylum during a brutal winter storm.

What could possibly go wrong?

Pretty much everything.

The snow-covered setting gives Wrong Turn 4 a distinct visual identity compared to earlier entries. The frozen wilderness and decaying corridors of the asylum create a cold, claustrophobic atmosphere that works surprisingly well for the series. Snowstorms howl outside while flickering lights reveal the rusted, industrial skeleton of the building inside.

And somewhere in those dark hallways, the cannibal brothers are waiting.

This installment wastes very little time pretending to care about subtlety. The kills are immediate, vicious, and often shockingly mean-spirited. Barbed wire traps, brutal impalements, bone saws, and dismemberments are served up with gleeful excess.

One particular sequence involving a gruesome dinner table scenario has become infamous among fans for just how far it pushes the film’s sadistic tone.

The characters themselves are mostly standard slasher archetypes—party-loving college kids whose main purpose is to wander into danger and meet creative ends. But in a franchise like Wrong Turn, that’s hardly the point.

The point is carnage.

And on that front, Wrong Turn 4 delivers.

Where the film occasionally stumbles is in its pacing and suspense. Because the killers are revealed early and frequently, the story rarely builds real tension—it simply moves from one violent set piece to the next.

Still, if you’re here for exactly what the franchise promises—mutant cannibals, inventive gore, and a body count that climbs fast—you’ll likely find plenty to enjoy.

Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings may not deepen the mythology in any meaningful way, but it doesn’t pretend to.

It’s a snow-covered slaughterhouse of a prequel that leans fully into the franchise’s most brutal instincts—and invites hardcore slasher fans to enjoy the carnage.