Review of Wrong Turn (2003) by Adam F — 07 May 2014

Here's a quick exercise; let's take a familiar horror premise and make a basic storyline out of it. Here are your restrictions: 6 ordinary people, 3 killer hillbillies. Go! Ok, so a group of friends out on vacation decide to take a detour. Their car breaks down and they go looking for a phone (because their cellphones... died. Yeah let's go with that). Little do they know though, they're being stalked by a family of crazed rednecks, out for blood! These guys are going to be all crazy and all deformed and hungry! They will be going in and killing these teens, mostly in original gruesome ways. Meanwhile though, these people are unaware they're being stalked until it's too late! There you go, one generic killer hillbilly movie and the plot of "Wrong Turn". It's the story of a medical student named Chris (Desmond Harrington) who is driving through West Virginia but is forced to take a detour. It's his bad luck because today the stars have aligned and the dumbest medical student of all time has bumped into the dumbest group of friends ever. He crashes into a Range Rover belonging to love interest Jessie (Eliza Dushku), her friend Carly (Emmanuelle Chriqui) and her fiancé Scott (Jeremy Sisto), who are out driving with another couple Evan and Francine (Kevin Zegers and Lindy Booth). They're stalked and attacked by a trio of inbred rednecks, out for blood and hungry for human flesh.

If you've seen even a handful of horror movies you'll find "Wrong Turn" extremely predictable. You can tell from the very moment a character presents him or herself at what point they're going to die (if at all). Whenever an object is seen on-screen you can easily see what is going to happen with it. If the radio the characters find works, it will only be briefly enough to give away our heroes' location to the villains. Every other time, it's completely useless. The road they take when they've finally managed to get a working vehicle? You know it's going to be a dead end. It goes on and on from there. This would be tolerable if the characters were charismatic but these are just idiotic. It takes them forever to figure out that the killer hillbillies are killer hillbillies. I don't know about you, but the second I walk into a room and there's a jar full of dentures and teeth, I'm assuming serial killers and I am running for the door. For these guys though, that's not enough. Seeing the yard full of dozens of abandoned vehicles, the bowl full of car keys, the fridge full of chopped up organs, the axes, guns and weapons hanging on the walls, finding the same kind of barbed with that tore up their tires doesn't mean anything to them. It isn't until they find a dead body that they finally think something might be shady here. Even so, what do these morons do? Arm themselves? No. They just bumble around, waiting to get picked off one by one.

I realize that as an audience member I'm not under the same stress as someone that is fighting for their lives and because I've seen the Dvd cover I know things are going to go awry but come on. Are these people capable of formulating any kind of survival plan at all? It doesn't help that this is the kind of horror film where being inbred gives you impossibly superhuman resistance and strength. In the opening credits they give a quick explanation for the bloodthirstiness and the psychosis, the enhanced strength and inability to feel pain but when you get an arrow in your skull and you can still get up like nothing happened, that's just ridiculous.

On the plus side, the makeup, special effects and gore are well done. This is a really low budget horror movie but it never shows that they likely had to cut corners here and there. As a first real effort from director Rob Schmidt, this is competently put together; it's just the story that lacks. Hopefully he moves on to bigger and better things because this is the generic killer hillbilly movie you think of when someone mentions killer hillbillies. There's nothing you haven't seen before and you'll be more frustrated at the characters than scared as to whether or not they'll make it out alive. At least there wasn't any rape, bonus points for that. (On Dvd, October 13, 2013).