Review of Wrong Turn (2021) by Chezequerz — 05 Apr 2021

This is not a Wrong Turn movie. Nor is it a horror movie. The film features a colony of hold outs of the US civil war in the mountains of the midwest (who also apparently live in a normal town too?). The film sees a bunch of 20 somethings getting cut to pieces in the woods by traps before finding and killing the man in the deer skull outfit depicted on the movie cover who was apparently trying to help them get off the mountain (but apparently forgot how to speak English despite all the others in his colony seemingly speaking English).

..this is the only time that the masked man with the axe is seen by the way, the movie cover is a shameless and cynical attempt to cash in on the success of the Wrong Turn horror franchise but in all honesty this movie is far closer to a modern reimagining of Deliverance than Wrong Turn.

The film then becomes about one of the 20 something's father setting out to set her free and return her to her family, basically we've gone from Deliverance to some kind of rural version of Taken. Not sure how much time is meant to have passed between the first act and the second act but in that time his daughter has apparently become a world class archer and her ex-boyfriend has become a full blown cultist to the people he hated for reasons we never really see much of.

The finale sees the colony leader and some friends of his rock up to her house in a campervan and she uses her new overnight ninja powers to kill them all...that's about the sum of it. The characterisation in this movie is bland, uninspired and 1 dimensional.

In many instances the characters are doing stuff because the plot needs something to happen rather than because it makes sense. The movie stays firmly away from the concepts of inbreds, cannibalism or manhunting that largely defined the real Wrong Turn movies.

There's a brief suggestion of inbreeding when they recruit those 20 somethings to their colony because they "have healthy blood" but there's no visible sign of inbreeding much less mutation and the colonists seem to yoyo between "only killing trespassers" and "not really killing anyone".

Whilst nobody really had high expectations on this movie (the original is hardly 'The Godfather')I'm not sure anyone expected whatever the hell this movie is supposed to be.