Wrong Turn (2021) - Review Thread

Despite it being something of a poster child for trashy direct to video horror movies, I admit I haven't been following the Wrong Turn series. I never really felt an incentive to, really. And yet whoever owns these movies just kept pumping them out, so there must be some demand for them. Apparently they're what you'd expect for low demanding, cheap trash, featuring pretty good gore and nudity for those who watch movies for that, and some of them are pretty well liked. I'm more of a follower of trashy films that wander off into their own direction and either succeed or go haywire, as long as its interesting. The Wrong Turn sequels always seemed too...expected.

I have seen the first movie though, and I remember liking as I rented the DVD back when it first came out in 2003. I haven't watched it since and today, for the life of me, I couldn't tell you all that much about it other than Eliza Dushku was in it. What I do remember is that it involved a group of hot teens getting lost on a road trip only to wind up in the midst of deformed inbred cannibals. Basically it was a blatant rip of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes that managed to squeeze itself into the view of blossoming horror fanatic teenages just before those movies got remade in the mid 2000's.

Flash-forward to 2021, and we have the latest entry in the saga, a reboot written by the original's screenwriter Alan B. McElroy, who seems to have sold this script based on "What if I took the concept of taking a wrong turn and instead of ripping off Chainsaw and Hills, I tried to do something different instead?" I kind of like that. Taking your derivative early career screenplay and trying to make into something less derivative. And that's a classy way to try to sell an audience on the idea of the reboot.

What it needs is to not suck balls.

To an extent, the film strays so far away from the Wrong Turn concept that other than brand recognition, it doesn't feel like it should be a part of that franchise at all. There is even barely a "wrong turn" as a plot point at all, as all the main characters do is stray from a hiking path, which they do on purpose. Instead of bumping into cannibals, they bump into a group of villagers who have kept their society in secret for hundreds of years, seceding from the US though the US government doesn't really know they they seceded. It's like The Village, only they know what's out there and there ia no bullshit Shyamalan twist keeping them in.

There are some clever ideas in play. As the plot unfolds, our main characters make morally gray choices, which does allow the viewer to consider that the villagers that they've bumped into are not entirely in the wrong here for being pissed at them. Think of it as partially I Know What You Did Last Summer with a hint of Cannibal Holocaust. But good intentions like this are effectively ruined by the film's bland storytelling. The film feels it needs to spell out its moral grayness to the audience with a speech during a trial scene, where the main "final girl" of the piece argues that the villagers are behaving barbaric, where the presiding village chief has to go on with a clearly rehearsed rant about how their society compares to ours and wants us to question which one is really "barbaric."

Jesus Christ movie. Don't bait me in then cut the line like that. I'm trying to like you.

If I were to make a comparison between Wrong Turn 2021 and any remake/reboot in recent years, the one that springs to mind first, bizarrely enough, would be Leprechaun: Origins. That film is also rebooted a film franchise by trying to reinvent it, but also did it in a way where it was virtually unrecognizable. At the same time, it also features a similar bland, greenish-gray cinematography and sleepy tone. This film is directed by newcomer Mike P. Nelson, who is unfortunately not the same Mike Nelson from Mystery Science Theater and Rifftrax fame. He doesn't seem to have a proper frame for excitement that the picture needs as it just kind of drones on in a bored stupor. It's a thriller that tuckers you out, without very many thrills.

Wrong Turn 2021 is a movie that tries to coast on having the audience member point at it and claim "I see what you did there!" I appreciate there is some effort to make a unique film experience over the original, and even some smart twists that could have worked in the movie's favor if it were better made. But there is one thing I can definitively say about the original Wrong Turn even with my hazy memories of it is that it had a personality. Being dreary isn't a personality. I'm starting to feel that by tomorrow I'm going to remember more about the original Wrong Turn than I am of this reinvention.