Drawing on the long tradition of slasher flicks such as Friday 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, the movie pits a group of urban twenty-somethings on a camping trip against a family of cannibalistic inbred mountain people. As per usual, the opening of the film introduces a couple of characters who provide the first bodies to warm the audience up, before the title sequence presents us with a series of close-ups of newspaper stories which explain what is lurking in the great outdoors.
Deathmatch
This ensures that there’s nothing coy about Wrong Turn: from the very beginning we’re told that it deals with genetically mutated hillbillies who are impervious to pain. The same goes for Ro Schmidt’s direction, which gives us a pretty good look at the hill-folk in question early on, and unfortunately drains the piece of any real suspense. Without any sense of mystery or backstory, Wrong Turn resembles a hastily arranged gladiatorial contest; in the blue(state) corner, some groomed young things from the city; in the red(state) corner, subhuman inbreds types, let the slaying begin. Having put all its cards on the table so quickly, the film has to fall back on a series of derivative death scenes for any sense of shock.
Between the Lines
There are some engaging performances in Wrong Turn: Eliza Dushku manages to suggest there’s more going on in her character’s head than is coming out of her mouth, and Jeremy Sisko is likeable and garrulous enough to feel like a loss to the movie when his character eventually takes one for the team. In fact, Sisko would have probably made a more interesting lead than Desmond Harrington, who is reduced to playing ‘sincere’, which involves saying very little and giving a lot of hard looks.
As a straightforward slasher flick, Wrong Turn ticks some of the necessary boxes, but it’s ultimately unsatisfactory. The mountain men could have been an interesting idea, but on screen they have an unfortunate tendency to remind the viewer of the orcs from Tolkien movies. It fails to pay back the borrowings it makes from previous movies: for example, the reference one character makes to Deliverance only serves to point out how very far Wrong Turn is from providing anything like the same experience. If the horror genre advances by mutation and selection, Wrong Turn might best be classed as a necessary failure, doomed to be left in a genetic cul-de-sac along with its cannibalistic hillbillies.
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