If we were to rank the famous cannibalistic families of the horror genre, I don’t think anyone would dare contradict me when I say that the misshapen clan from the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre would rank pretty high in almost all of their incarnations. Coming in second, I would wager, would be the various dessert dwelling versions of the mutants from The Hill Have Eyes series that earns it’s spot chiefly for the sheer brutality of the franchise and the iconic, hairless visage of Michael Berryman’s Pluto glaring at us from the original poster.
However, pulling up in a distant third would undoubtedly be the assortment of inbred hillbillies that stalk the forests of West Virgina that we were introduced to thanks to 2003s Wrong Turn – and then subjected to thanks to a seemingly endless run of direct to DVD sequels that just didn’t know when to quit. It may surprise you to learn, then, that the first follow up actually isn’t that bad at all and was the feature debut of Joe Lynch, who has become something of a genre celebrity over the years; so let’s head back into the woods and see what – or who – bites.
Despite the events of the first movie, a group of people have happily returned to the woodlands of West Virgina in order to film an obnoxious survival reality game show with the rather under the radar title of The Apocalypse: Ultimate Survivor. The rules are pretty simple as it’s just a more stripped back variant of Survivor, but while pretentious director “M” seems devoid of original ideas, one thing this show has that others don’t is that it’s being hosted by impossibly tough former U.S. Marine Colonel Dale Murphy who seems the real deal.
The contestants assemble and feature a mix of douchebag skateboarders, vapid lingerie models, former football players, hostile vegan graphic artists and a lesbian Iraq War vet, but after a further contestant fails to show, M forces his producer girlfriend to reluctantly participate in her stead. Of course, the reason why this final entrant is late is because she’s actually late – as in dead, as she’s been split in half by a couple of deformed mutant cannibals whose existence prove that the trio of hulking predators that populated the first movie wasn’t the last of their kind. In fact, while one of that group – the cackling Three-Finger – has actually survived, he’s joined another branch of his fucked up family tree that’s made up of the towering Pa, the pregnant Ma and their incestuous kids, Brother and Sister.
Before you know it, this new clan has fallen upon this horribly unprepared group of reality show personalities who are about to find out what survival really means, but while blood sprays and viscera spills, both sides take sizable losses.
Who will walk away from this gruesome confrontation with all their bits intact and who will be reduced to so much bloody mincemeat when this slash-happy showdown comes to its climax?
Rob Schmidt’s original Wrong Turn was a slick, no-nonsense, backwoods slasher that benefited hugely from a cast well stocked with push-up bras and a cadre of lumpy-faced marauders designed by special effects legend Stan Winston, but while it was a rather refreshing break from the meta humour of the late 90s, I’d hardly call it a full blown classic of the genre. However, when it comes to the rather mercenary world of direct to DVD sequels, being regarded as a classic isn’t exactly a must and if we cast an eye to the future, the Wrong Turn saga eventually walked away with five sequels and a very separate remake. Other franchises, such as Hellraiser, Lake Placid and Children Of The Corn went the same way in double the time, but while the inevitable rot began to set in fairly quickly, Wrong Turn 2: Dead End actually manages to stave off the worst of the creative void that usually consumes such franchises by taking the original movie’s fairly stern tone and dumping it into the nearest offal bin.
While Schmidt played things dead straight with minimal jokes, serious characters and gore that didn’t veer into Looney Tunes territory, Lynch rolls up his sleeves and wades into the fray by immediately giving us an outlandish gore gag that literally sees a woman split in half with an axe that’s framed with her legs falling in impossible directions while her guts hit the tarmac with a satisfying splat. Tonally it couldn’t be at more odds with its predecessor if the bedraggled bad guys engaged in a mid-film song and dance number, but while Lynch is obviously having a ball with taking this universe and adding a hint of Peter Jackson lunacy to it, it actually succeeds in being quite fun even if it ends up being fairly derivative of virtually every crazies-in-woods movie you’ve ever seen.
For a start, the whole reality show thing had already been done with Halloween: Resurrection back in 2002 (although, to be fair, Wrong Turn 2 does it noticably better) and the assorted array of fairly unlikable characters is fairly indicative of that habit the horror movies of the 2000s had that everyone in them had to be complaining dick bags in order to justify the horrific end they have coming to them. Hence we have to spend a fair amount of time with the usual brand of misogynistic, anti-social and frankly annoying walking meat bags that have no clue that most of them are due to be rendered into a fine paste by the eager special effects crew. However, while this cluster of NPCs feature the odd famous face (Erica Leerhsen already has popped up in the Texas Chainsaw remake and a Blair Witch sequel leaving her uniquely prepare for this latest romp on the woods), the only one who really stands out is none other than Henry fuckin’ Rollins who is so much fun as the typically pumped former marine, you often wish he was squaring off against the fucked up mutant family on his lonesome rather than playing second fiddle to generic toe taggers.
If I’m being honest, the deformed cannibal family aren’t that much more memorable either, suffering in comparison to Stan Winston’s original designs, but Lynch certainly seems to be having fun with them, leaning fully into jocular skits about incest and masterbating involving the double jointed Brother and the incredibly jealous sister and constantly riffing on Texas Chainsaw with familiar looking dinner scenes. It also has to be noted that Three-Finger is looking oddly healthy (so to speak) after being nicely scorched the previous time round, but the fact that he also takes a shotgun blast to the chest during this film and turns up at the end of the film fit enough to raise a faceless, mutant baby announces his ascension to the main face of the franchise despite him being a forgettable member of the horror cannon.
And yet none of this seems to matters much as Lynch’s energy and eagerness to enforce some jet black gallows humor into a formally serious universe works far better than you’d expect and succeeds in replacing the slick productions with a real sense of character. Plus it also helps that the director has a good eye for the more splattery moments to with a double arrow kill and that spectacular opening split right down the middle.
Best Wrong Turn movie? Well, that depends on your tastes and preferences for what you expect from the rather love starved franchise, but it certainly is one of the better entries in a saga that’s as famously uneven as its antagonists dental work.
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