February 15, 2021

Film Review: Wrong Turn (2021)

Wrong Turn stars Charlotte Vega, Matthew Modine, and Bill Sage in a bloody, brutal, and primal societal slugfest, proving over its 109-minute runtime that there’s still fresh horror in a familiar, forgotten franchise.

It’s been nearly two decades since writer Alan B. McElroy delivered the original Wrong Turn, a comically gory slasher that blended The Hills Have Eyes super-mutants with a touch of Cabin Fever crass.

While McElroy wasn’t involved with Wrong Turn’s five, increasingly ludicrous sequels, his return to writing here reveals a glimpse of what the series could have been, helmed by director Mike P. Nelson of brilliantly B-grade action-horror film, The Domestics.

Reboots and remakes – particularly in the horror genre – often get a harsh deal,

with equal parts ‘this will ruin the original’ and ‘what is the point?’ thrown around the moment the first trailer drops. But horror often benefits the most from a refresh, partly due to the ongoing one-upmanship of SFX which flourished in the ‘80s, but primarily because those old scares often grow stale.

When a remake or reboot is done well (The Fly, The Crazies, The Hills Have Eyes, Dawn of The Dead, Maniac, Suspiria) it’s a fantastic opportunity to remind an audience why this nightmare fuel can simultaneously entertain, fascinate, and make our skin crawl. When it’s done wrong (Fright Night, The Thing, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, The Omen), the horror is being forced to stifle 90+ minutes of repetitive groans.

Wrong Turn fits somewhere in the middle of these, offering more than a handful of memory-burning horror moments while somehow managing to overcomplicate its traditionally simple storyline: a group of attractive uni students / suburban young adults take a trip to the backwoods of West Virginia and is murdered by an eclectic family of superhuman toxic-waste cannibals.

It’s a tired, but reliable, formula;

if you go down to the Appalachians today, you’re gonna be cannibal pie, as the adage goes. But mostly, it’s the type of dynamic which lets us sympathise with generally terrible protagonists equipped only with plot armour and B-grade dialogue.

In this latest adventure off the beaten track, our usual cardboard-cut-out uni students are replaced with a group of semi-successful, woke-spewing millennials, who are all just generally awful, stupid people, both as individuals and to each other as friends.

The first 15 minutes of the film sees level-headed Jen Shaw (Charlotte Vega), her idealistic boyfriend Darius (Adain Bradley), co-dependent powderkeg-couple Milla and Adam (Emma Dumont and Dylan McTee), and gay couple Luis and Gary (Adrian Favela and Vardaan Arora) preach about inclusivity, diversity, compassion and self-empowerment before nose-diving into snide xenophobic commentary about hillbillies and then using that same xenophobia to justify committing and concealing a murder all of 20 minutes later.

The situation escalates into more bloodshed and trap-laced gore,

while character development and consistency deteriorates, until the surviving members are kidnapped by a group of beautifully macabre skull-masked creeps known as The Foundation, and offered a respite from their confused self-righteousness.

The Foundation are, according to their leader Venable (Bill Sage), ‘men and women of all races and creeds… [who] have everything they need…[where] everyone works, everyone contributes… no cancer, no poverty, no war, no one hates another because they have what the other doesn’t. One body, working together’, which is agonisingly similar to a thought voiced earlier by Darius to Jen, prior to setting off on the trail.

‘I want to build a community where people are valued on their skills and their character. Not their bank account or their skin colour. Everyone works, everyone shares. I’d give anything for that’, Darius says, unaware that his moral compass is just a plot device to bolster complexity throughout the Midsommar-inspired second act of the film.

Later, Venable (a.k.a. Ram Skull the twin-scythe, family-murdering hypocrite) doubles down on his 1850s philosophy, saying ‘people come to the mountains looking for something. Something to remind them that life is worth living’, despite having a cave full of captives with their eye sockets burned to ash and a mountain-side of brutal traps John ‘Jigsaw’ Kramer would be proud of.

The only character without the ethical clarity of an oil drum is Jen’s father,

Scott (Matthew Modine), the voice of reason and calm logic in the film while simultaneously being the personification of a Swiss Army knife. His performance bookends the film and, despite roughly 20 minutes on screen, is by far the most consistent and entertaining character on display.

And this, essentially, is what stops Wrong Turn from being more than just an entertaining, semi-unpredictable remake. The lack of relatable, or rounded, characters means the initial 45 minutes of tension deflate; this group is so resourceless and clueless that they’re destined to die, and so utterly unlikable that you can’t help but root for the reclusive Wendigo cosplay enthusiasts.

It feels like the film started with The Foundation and worked backwards, adjusting character actions, motives, morals, and reasoning only to further support and justify the ‘oh how wrong we were’ narrative presented in the middle of the film. The real tragedy here is that it’s not overly necessary; The Foundation quite clearly aren’t good people (See: aforementioned cave filled with captives carved out to look like an abandoned Mr Potato Head) so why waste time pretending they are, and making almost everyone else in the film an irredeemable mess?

It only serves to detract from everything that is great about this film. Charlotte Vega is fully committed to her role and gives a mesmerising performance on-par with Florence Pugh in Midsommar, quietly horrified and portraying more with a glance than her lines would ever allow her. Bill Sage is absolutely brilliant, bringing the same masterful and patient performance seen previously in We Are What We Are and displaying a truly brutal and powerful presence.

The brilliantly creepy and instantly memorable Tim de Zarn (Cabin in The Woods) makes the most out of his small role once again, while Adain Bradley, Dylan McTee, Emma Dumont, and Daisy Head all provide incredibly solid, stand-out performances.

Undeniably, Wrong Turn is visually stunning;

panning shots across the expansive mountains and forests rival The Green Inferno in its depiction of hidden desolation and inescapable hell, while the SFX of each gore-drenched death is absolutely masterful in its execution. Bones crunch, flesh tears, wood splits, and each wet thud and torturous sizzle is perfectly placed, underpinned by an eerie soundtrack of wobbly deep-bass synths and distorted strings throughout.

The final 20 minutes of Wrong Turn descend into an Appalachian Event Horizon, which concludes with a final scene as rewatchable as the closing moments of Identity, and a chilling three-second moment from barely used Valerie Jane Parker that will burn deep into your memory.

Ultimately, the foundation of this film (in both senses) is one built on ambition, crippling itself with complexity when it could have kept things simple and flourished. It borrows subtly and frequently from horror films of the past two decades, which seems fitting considering the nature of this reboot, yet shies away from the unflinching horror it often aims to replicate.

While it has little in common with the original film series (for better or worse), there’s no doubt I’ll rewatch this as much as I did the original; at midnight with my own group of questionably terrible friends, and best enjoyed with three fingers of moonshine and improvised, B-grade commentary.