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Wrong Turn

With the state of the horror genre largely defunct these days, it's refreshing to see a film that foregoes the current trend of self-referential jokes in favor of old-fashioned suspense and gore. Unfortunately, in the case of Wrong Turn, which pays questionable homage to other genre classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The X-Files episode "Home," there's neither much of the former category to be found nor will the viewer find much originality, sensibility, or new twist on familiar conventions.

Thanks to the efforts of makeup effects veteran Stan Winston, there's no shortage of gruesome deaths and, when the film's inbred mutants show up, no lack of freaks either. However, one also will find no deficit of clichés such as the broken down car in the middle of nowhere and the ramshackle house that reeks of trouble. The cops who are reluctant to believe that anything’s wrong, and the ever-famous have-sex-and-die clause popularized during the seventies and eighties.

The only thing that abounds more than the clichés are the holes in the simple, bare-bones story. The opening credits spare the audience any lengthy exposition by flashing a series of news articles describing the film’s inbred, mutated family, which suffers incest-related psychosis. Why they would be covered in the same newspapers that feature headlines about missing travelers in the same area and still be allowed to roam free is a question the audience apparently is not supposed to ask.

In the present day a young man (Desmond Harrington) on his way to a job interview in West Virginia detours onto dirt side roads. He soon collides with a carful of fellow twentysomethings, whose car has been not so accidentally disabled by a length of barbed wire strung out across the road. They are taking the only conveniently single member of their party (the talented Eliza Dushku) on a weekend trip to the woods to help her recover from a recent relationship.

While half the group ventures off to seek help (their cell phones, of course, no longer work), the other half stays behind to smoke dope, have sex, and pay the inevitable price. Meanwhile the others happen upon a rustic cabin in the woods, which, upon closer inspection, could pass for one of Ed Gein’s hangouts. Naturally the mutant family returns with the youths now trapped inside the house. Their escape is perhaps the only genuinely suspenseful scene in the entire film.

After that it’s a by-the-numbers body count as the gnarled residents hunt their remaining quarry through the forest. Eventually they end up in a huge clearing filled with cars belonging to the missing people from the opening credits, which the authorities apparently never bothered to look too hard for.

With little to nothing to offer in the areas of plot and character development, and so many elements of the former lifted from other, better films, the least Wrong Turn could have done was to put a new face on an old act. Even some kind of clever self-referential touch would have helped. The script offers no innovation or ambition—if old horror movie archetypes are to be resurrected, their directors could at least have the decency to go back and study the source material. Perhaps then they might realize what made those films so effective—the subtext or subtle social commentary that made the onscreen terrors more relatable to real life.

This film might have been more effective had it been released during the stalker/slasher heyday—by today’s standards, it’s nothing more than an unoriginal collection of tricks that have been turned too many times.

Written by: Michael McDonough

Reviewers Rating: 6.5
Reader's Rating: 8.52
Reader's Votes: 19

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