Stick

I have to say I think Wrong Turn is a hell of a lot of fun. Stupid beyond all belief-but a hell of a lot of fun. There's a really exciting segment in which our fearless heros try to outwit the inbreeds high up in the trees. And how about that redneck with the goofy giggle? What a riot. Me and a buddy of mine saw this at a midnight screening and we were laughing all the way through it. True, the imbreeds aren't particularly scary, and the idea that they're superhuman (they keep coming back at the end of the movie) is just ridiculous. Still, the movie falls into the "it's so bad it's actually kind of amusing" category. So much so in fact, that I recently bought it on DVD. My great uncle Ernie and I just watched last night.

Stick

pauline

Wrong Turn is perhaps the most apt title this film could have, as it very well could have been an effective thriller had it's creators taken a few correct turns along the way. The premise is straight out of Deliverance, with a group of foolish humans ending up back in the West Virginia hollows, where one’s father is also frequently one’s Uncle and first cousin. This is where the similarities to the cult banjo-picking classic ends. The first wrong turn the film’s creators make is in it’s tone - there is absolutely no tongue-in-cheek irony anywhere to be found. Which is too bad because the concept and/or reality of seriously inbreed mutant cannibals is fertile soil for the sort of double play that Kevin Williamson stumbled onto with Scream.

Wrong Turn is straight ahead, “oops we stumbled into the monster den seriousness,” more akin to The Hills Have Eyes. The victims of titular Wrong Turn (Eliza Dushku, Lindy Booth, Kevin Zegers, Jeremy Sisto and Emmanuelle Chriqui), thankfully don’t act in a stupid illogical manner, they quickly size-up the error of their ways and endeavor to extricate themselves from the premises ASAP, but alas - up pulls the truck and they’re forced to hide inside the cabin. A cabin they share with a half dozen corpses in various stages of butchery and decomposition, as well as David Lynch-esque collections of personal items and body parts. This is the most compelling part of the film because it’s at this point that you become aware that these fellas aren’t so much monsters as they are hunting cannibals.

One would assume that boys and their forbears had long since scared most of the edible wildlife all the way to Utah, leaving only the occasional hiker the staple of their diet. From the POV of these shallow breathing would-be entrees we watch as the boys matter-of-factly carve up other fresh catch in preparation for dinner. Where I believe this film makes a really bad wrong turn is during this scene. Director Rob Schmidt was wise to show us only scant glimpses of the freaks, but this movie could have been terrifically creepy had they engaged in conversation - of any kind. No matter how rudimentary all it would have needed was for the "smart" one to mention that “Unggh . . . fat guy, na be good eat’n.” If the writers and directors would have humanized these inbred monsters just a notch it would have scared the hell out of me. Just to hear them casually discussing “Whuthernot mite rain.” Anything, that would have totally got me. Sadly the mutants remained mute and the rest of the film boiled down to a little cat and mouse combined with a fifty yard dash and a car chase.

The biggest Wrong Turn was the monsters. They were just to inhuman to pass as anything that had ever evolved from one. Had the disfigurements been more in line with photos of some of the “true story” mutations that were scattered beneath the opening credits, it would have been alot more scary. As it was, the inbreeds were basically Orcs which made them a lot less threatening than had they been less-monster/freak and more human. There are entertaining sequences in this film, but it’s lack of real scares, irony and imagination kept it from rising to it’s potential. At the end of the day, the closer a monster looks to your great uncle Ernie, the scarier he’s gonna be.

Anonymous Coward

a yo this movie rocked for real

Cara

Again a film which took too much inspiration from previous classics. 2003 seemed to be a bad year for horror with Identity and this! Did anyone else get the slight hints of Texas Chainsaw Massacre? By the way, which was made first this or Dead End because as the titles of both suggest there's a similarity in background.