WRONG TURN 5: BLOODLINES (2012)

Welcome to the Mountain Man Festival.  It's suppose to be a huge festival thing like Burning Man or something.  Who knows.  Five douchers are driving down a country road on there way to the festival, when they suddenly see a hillbilly standing in the road.  They swerve to avoid the slack-jawed yokel and hit a tree instead.  Then the fuzz shows up and arrests everybody.  That's bad news bears for the five douchers, because the hillbilly just happens to be the father of the three psychos from Part 4.  And now they're on their way to bust him out of jail RIO BRAVO-style.  What an amazing story.

Nice change of setting (even though the city was clearly a sound stage), quick pace, violence, badly lit nudity, snow plow kills, leg torture, dismemberment, burned alive in a barrel, Pinhead without his makeup on, stupid decisions, forced to eat your own intestines, electrocution, eyeball removal, suicide.  If you're a horror fan, it's worth a one time viewing, but really that's it.

My biggest complaint, besides the weak script, is: no Jennifer Pudavick.  As awesome as Part 4 was in the violence and story departments, the film overall was even more awesome because of her presence.  She carried the film and if the filmmakers were wise, they would just bring her back in each film.  I know she died in Part 4, but she could have easily played the sheriff in this film and it would have benefited greatly.

Part 1 - Wrong Turn (2003)
Part 2 - Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007)
Part 3 - Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead (2009)
Part 4 - Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings (2011)
Part 6 - Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort
Reboot - Wrong Turn (2021)

HOT SPELL (1958)

Wow!  What a powder keg this movie was!  I came by it completely by mistake and within the first two minutes I was hooked and I didn't turn away for the rest of the movie. Set during a sweltering New Orleans summer, housewife Shirley Booth is living in a delusional dream world.  Her husband, Anthony Quinn, still loves her as a person and a mother to their three children, but he's tired of her and goes off all the time boozing and sleeping with younger women.  Her children are another matter.  Both of the boys are old enough to move out on their own, but she still smothers them.  And her daughter, Shirley MacLaine, is in love with a shallow guy, but mother only worsens things by giving her well-intentioned advise that doesn't turn out too well.

If you're used to Shirley Booth as the spunky maid from "Hazel" you're gonna be shocked when you see her here cause she turns in a heartbreaking performance.  Her whole life since she was just a teenager she's dedicated to her husband and children, but now that they've outgrown her, she's lost.  She never developed a personality of her own.  Her family was her personality.

Lots and lots of screaming and arguing, blistering fast pace, excellent script with some brutal as fuck lines, award level acting by the entire cast, thought provoking story and an ending that actually caught me off guard.  Highly recommended.

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (2010)

Werner Herzog visits the Chauvet Cave in France where in 1994 scientists discovered prehistoric art and fossils dating back over 30,000 years.

If this film had only been 45 minutes long it would have been just fine, but at 90 it outlasted it's subject matter.  I enjoyed Werner's previous documentary feature ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (about scientists in Antarctica) because there was just so much to say and so many interesting characters and sights to see, but here all we have is a cave and some drawings on the wall.  Yes, it's very interesting and very important to document and preserve the cave, but as far as this film goes I just found myself bored after the initial shock of seeing the drawings.  Werner himself had only a few seconds of screen time and none of the people he interviewed were interesting.  It's all stuff we've see before.  Do I really need to see a guy giving a demonstration of how a spear works?  No.  Or a guy noodling on a ancient flute?  Not really.  Or a guy walking around sniffing the ground looking for maybe another cave?  Hell no.

Worth watching if you're into this sort of thing, but don't blame me if your mind starts to wander during the last half.