How do you keep a horror-film series fresh by the time it reaches its fifth installment? One way is to introduce a veteran of a different fright franchise, and that’s what the makers of WRONG TURN 5: BLOODLINES have done, casting HELLRAISER stalwart Doug Bradley in a key role. The actor talked up the role with Fango, and we’ve got some exclusive pics to share as well.

Debuting today on DVD and Blu-ray/DVD combo from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, (see details here), WRONG TURN 5: BLOODLINES stars Bradley as Maynard J. Odets, a new villain with an important part to play in the development of the films’ trio of deformed hillbilly cannibals. Speaking to Fango at the recent Horrorfind Weekend in Pennsylvania, Bradley explains, “WRONG TURN 4 was a prequel. The Three Stooges, as I took to calling them, were holed up in an abandoned hospital carrying out their nefarious deeds, so the idea is that WRONG TURN 5 is, as it were, WRONG TURN 2, and WRONG TURN 4 was WRONG TURN 1. It’s a bit like STAR WARS [laughs], so the first WRONG TURN becomes WRONG TURN 3.

“Anyway, Maynard is cut from the same cloth as the three of them, which is to say he is also a murderous, cannibalistic backwoodsman. He has been quietly living somewhere in the backwaters of West Virginia for 30 years, apparently, living off the money and the meat of passing strangers. The Three Stooges have come to him, he has taken them under his wing and is trying to teach them to follow his ways; they’re a little too careless for his liking. But Maynard runs afoul of the local sheriff, and ends up in her jail for some of the time. The other main story thread is that there’s a music festival, kind of a cross between Coachella and Burning Man, called the Mountain Man Festival, which takes place in this little town every year—which of course if very good for Maynard, because it brings lots of passing people, hitchhikers or, in the case of the movie, a group of college students who take a wrong turn and get a little lost in the backwoods. Of course, that’s perfect for him, because nobody’s going to register them as missing until probably a couple of days after the festival is over, by which time all traces can be covered up.”

So how did the British Bradley wind up being cast as a West Virginian mountain man? “Probably because, as Hollywood will, they shot the movie in Sofia, Bulgaria, and it was cheaper for them to come through London and cast British actors. Now, I dragged my heels a little bit over it, because I was coming over to the States and didn’t really want to have to change all my plans and go to Bulgaria instead. I didn’t think the audition had gone very well, and then I was offered the part, and it turned out that at this point the director [Declan O’Brien] didn’t know; he had apparently picked out my audition tape and said, ‘He’s the guy,’ but he had no idea of my horror pedigree. So he contacted my manager here in the States, and at some point in the conversation, ‘Oh, by the way, you do know…?’ was dropped in, so negotiations kind of started over. And in the end I said yes, and I had a great time.”

The actor admits it was a relief not to have to don Pinhead-level prosthetics to portray Maynard (“just some bumps and bruises and cuts and nicks”), and that it felt a little strange to be a newcomer to someone else’s established horror franchise. “But it helped, I suppose, in that Maynard has had nothing to do with anything else that has gone on, and indeed, WRONG TURNs 1-3 haven’t happened yet in the world I’m in. There was only WRONG TURN 4 for me to worry about, and I wasn’t part of that story. So I could treat it as an entirely new thing.”

---

News - Latest