How deep does a franchise have to twist itself into the ground before the word is given to hit the reboot button? Well, if history is any indication, it’s round about the time that said franchise stops being profitable in its current form and then lapses into a dormant state; but when you consider how low the Wrong Turn franchise had sank, you have to wonder how this particular horror brand name had managed to make any profit at all over the last few, godawful, installments.
To be fair, the Wrong Turn movies were hardly horror royalty to begin with, but a slick but derivative opener and a spitefully goofy sequel soon gave way to spiraling budgets and decreasing production values soon turned the franchise into yet another DTV wasteland that claimed such franchises as Hellraiser, Lake Placid and Children Of The Corn before it.
However, while most reboots tend to simply update the original premise, Wrong Turn 2021 tried something a little more radical in attempt to provide a much needed shake up – but would this prove to be the wrong-est Turn of all?
Just like a million more before them, a bunch of trendy youths decide to broaden their horizons and spend some time finding themselves as they arrive in a small town in rural Virgina in order to hike the Appalacian tail. Almost immediately their trendy clothes and modern outlooks on life rile up a few of the locals who don’t take it particularly kindly to spot mixed race couples and LGBTQIA+ relationships in their town, but the trio of couples, Jen and Darius, Adam and Milla and Gary and Luis push through the bigotry and set out early in the morning to become one with nature.
However, they soon get far closer to nature than they ever wanted too as a decision to leave the trail on Darius’ insistence results in a string of horrific encounters when a giant log suddenly rolls down a hill towards them and squishes one of their number like a bone-filled jam doughnut. From there, the group encounters various hunting traps and when one of their number is suddenly dragged away by a snare, his friends find him later being carried by two figure dressed in furs and wearing animal skulls as masks who speak an unknown language.
Tempers flare, assumptions are made and as a result, one of these bizarre looking mountain men is clubbed to death as the group retaliate to what they think is an attack; but after more of these freaky-looking figures show up, we soon start to realise that this is far more that just a standard case of a couple of maniacs running round the woods with sharp implements.
But as the scale of what they’ve wandered into begins to dawn on them, the people who come looking for them many months later will discover what their kids already know – some people will go to any lengths to maintain a simple life.
First things first, I have to give a respectful tip of the hat to screenwriter Alan B. McElroy who returns to the franchise after penning the original with the intention to completely flip the script and deliver something new to a franchise that seemingly had said everything there is to say about mutant, inbred cannibals scampering around the woods. Out is Three-Finger and his various brood members and in is a fair amount of heavy handed social commentary that sees its trendy, young leads coming into contact with an entire colony of forest dwellers known as The Foundation, whose ancestors decided to quit civilisation back in 1859 because they though America was going to destroy itself due to all their fancy new ways of thinking. It’s a bold move and on paper it’s an especially welcome one considering how noticably threadbare the franchise was getting, but it’s also quite the political shift for anyone just expecting another bout of cannibal chaos. I can see why Elloy and director Mike P. Nelson wanted to give the inbred insanity a rest, but the problem with this new Wrong Turn is that it’s reach seems to exceed it’s grasp at almost every – well, turn.
Fans of the series will no doubt be plenty pissed that our antagonists are essentially a more hardcore version of the community from M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, but while there’s some legitimately good ideas here (due to a misunderstanding, the forest folk aren’t actually the aggressors to start with and are only retaliating to the death of one of their own), it doesn’t actually prove to be overly interesting and in the efforts to mine the horror, the community laws and practices vary wildly from misunderstood to out and out evil. If the big twist is that these modern city folk have legitimately violated the Foundation’s laws, why have them keep blinded people in a mine like animals to push the whole villain thing?
However, maybe it might have worked better if the run time had been a little punchier, but the director and scripter seem to want to confounding expectations and has the film continue way past other movies would have wrapped things up. Once Jen and Darius realise that there’s only one way out of this alive (if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em I guess), the movie suddenly jumps ahead in time to focus on Matthew Modine’s anxious parent as he tries to find out what happened to his missing daughter, essentially starting the entire movie again. However, once this plot thread reaches its climax, Wrong Turn decides to do it again and by this point you’re just begging for the fucking thing to end.
It also doesn’t help that the movie’s themes are fairly obviously signposted – an earlier conversation about one character’s desire to live in a world where everyone shares for the good of the group means that a later twist that sees the same guy wish to stay with The Foundation because he “finally feels seen” is about as easy to predict as the outcome of a fight between John Wick and a six year old dog hating child with a nerf gun. Add to this the rather damning fact none of the characters are particularly likable and it seems that Wrong Turn’s managed to fire an arrow into its own foot when it should’ve been turning the franchise on its head.
There are good points. The cinematography is good and the film comes equipped with all the graphic skull crushing, eyeball gouging and body crushing that’s made the franchise drag itself along since 2003 and if nothing else, you legitimately will have no idea how this thing is going to end once you get into the last fifteen minutes.
But while this change of tone is welcome, you can’t help but feel that if it had been named anything else other than Wrong Turn, this switch from backwoods slasher to socially conscious rural horror proves to something of an incorrect maneuver…
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