Working title: “Wrong Turn: With Apologies to the State of West Virginia”
“Killer hicks in the backwoods” as a film premise has been done before. What differentiates Wrong Turn from the rest is that it failed to do it well. It failed to do anything well. Put out a low-budget horror flick starring a sex symbol like Eliza Dushku wandering about in the forest and you’ll make back your production costs off of horny teenage boys alone. Wait for it to hit DVD and you’ll know for certain that you’ve got a franchise on your hands. It’s an unfortunate trend of Hollywood which benefits films like Wrong Turn and the talentless mooks who put them together. So unless you can prove you purchased this Blu-ray for the extra features alone, you’re guilty of perpetuating that cycle yourself. Shame on you.
Chris Flynn (Desmond Harrington) really needed to make that interview. He was running on time until an accident on the highway forced him to reroute to the back roads of Appalachian West Virginia. Now, what decent job he needed to interview for in the middle of boondocks West Virginia I don’t know, but if you trust the worthless exposition that occurs when some of the other characters root through his car he was “a doctor or something”. On the twisting back roads Chris picks up speed and barrels around a corner and into the car of four other travelers who happened across a spool of barbed wire in the middle of the road. The newfound friends reel from the accident and begin racing for their lives when they discover similarly wrecked cars with blood smeared across the windshields. It’s quickly established that the barbed wire was no accident and this time wasn’t the first.
The true depths of their assailants’ depravity becomes clear when the expendable hapless travelers wander into their house of death and discover all sorts of body parts in jars and Tupperware containers. You know they’re rednecks because it’s namebrand Tupperware, none of that economically smarter Ziploc knock-off crap. Anyways, the hapless victims run about as the disfigured mutant people chop them to pieces one by one.
It’s nothing you didn’t expect and everything you did. The murders are all second-rate and there are even duplicate methods used in the first few kills. Some of them may be sudden and catch you off guard but they’re all so clichéd and hackneyed that it’s just boring.
Here’s a fun little test. Imagine you’ve got a band of bloodthirsty mutants on your tail and you’re in the woods. Do you run for the plainly obvious though clearly abandoned watchtower which will require you to climb up a tall rickety ladder? Follow-up question: upon reaching the top of the tower, do you take a quick look around to find the nearest road or stay up there, cornered, until the mutants come with torches? If you answered yes to the first part of the follow-up question, congratulations! You’re smarter than everyone in this movie. Inexplicable stupidity permeates the horror genre naturally, but the truly horrible ones accumulate such high concentrations that it’s unbearable to watch. Wrong Turn fits this description.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
If you’re such a masochist that you want to sit through the film a second time, you can do so with an audio commentary by Director Rob Schmidt and actors Desmond Harrington and Eliza Dushku. It’s like listening to the dumbest kids in your class describe “See Spot Run” after they only read the cliff notes. What is worth your time on the disc however, is a piece about costume effects guru Stan Winston whose record in the industry is impressive. The featurette is less than 5 minutes long leaving you feeling a little cheated as the man’s career is that interesting. Otherwise there’s a fluff piece on Eliza Dushku whom, while hot, has little interesting to say. And then a “making of” piece, which is just something no one wants to see.
"Wrong Turn" is on sale September 15, 2009 and is rated R. Horror. Directed by Rob Schmidt. Written by Alan B. McElroy. Starring Eliza Dushku, Jeremy Sisto, Desmond Harrington, Emmanuelle Chriqui.
