Harefooted Halloween: Wrong Turn

What I Liked: Once the action gets going it doesn’t really let up.  Honestly I thought this was going to be a capturing and torturing type scenario but thankfully that’s not the case.  It’s a chase movie with crazy backwoods killers running after a group of lost young people in the mountains of West Virginia.  The pace is quick because the characters always have to be on the move if they want to survive/catch their prey.

Most of the effects are done practically which is a nice thing to see from an early 2000’s production.  Using crude CGI for almost everything, regardless of how it looked, was very popular then.  But since Stan Winston produced and did the effects it appears they mainly did stuff for real here (except for one showoff-y death with computer help).  So scenes like strangling someone with barbed wire, getting shot in the leg, being set on fire and stabbing someone in the gut with a wrench all look great.  The showpiece is supposed to be the three hillbilly villains who are all deformed with messed up skin, scraggily hair, gnarly teeth and so forth but we never get that good of a look at them.  That leads me to my next point.

Interestingly the filmmakers decided to keep the grotesque appearance of the inbreds mysterious.  We pretty much never get a shot head on held for a decent length.  All the way through to the end we see closeups of their bodies or hands or the backs of their heads or wide shots of them in the distance or glimpses of their faces that only flash for a couple of frames before cutting away.  I don’t know if this was intentional from the start, if they didn’t have faith in the designs during production or if these bastards were so nasty looking the producers or higher ups decided to (or perhaps forced to) cut around their faces as much as possible.  On one hand I dig the mystique this builds where your imagination kind of fills in what you can’t see.  On the other hand it’s just a bizarre decision to stick to for the entire runtime.  In the end I think I might like it?  It’s a little different.

Gotta say the set design is fantastic.  The dilapidated shack of horrors that our leads stumble onto is wonderfully filthy and gross with plenty of body parts in jars and trash everywhere and vehicles strewn about from previous victims.

What I Didn’t Like: This is a very straightforward slasher picture with not much going on story-wise.  You got your standard group of twenty-somethings roaming the backroads, getting stranded and fighting for their lives.  That’s fine.  What’s unfortunate is the mountain men aren’t given any backstory or personality.  They’re simply silent murderous ogres who have little interaction with each other.  We don’t know why they do what they do or what their deal is at all.  That with the shot selection and editing choice to not show them very much makes these guys sorta forgettable.

Overall Impressions: Wrong Turn is a workmanlike slasher.  It’s not bad but it’s not great either.  I mean it’s competently made and everything but a bit flat.  They don’t expand on the obvious influences of Deliverance, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes or subvert expectations by throwing in a left turn twist or anything.  It’s right down the middle.

Maybe the most intriguing thing is that for some reason this spawned five sequels and a reboot.  I only vaguely remember hearing about the original when it came out so to have that kind of legacy is a touch surprising.  And don’t worry, we won’t be taking a detour down that mountain road.