Classic Horror Movie Review: 'Wrong Turn' (2003)

Halloween is upon us and with that the need to watch many, many horror movies. With that in mind, I have been watching horror after horror after horror movie, in my pursuit to review as many horror movies as possible. It was this quest that brought me to revisit a horror movie of my past as a critic. In 2003, I reviewed the horror movie Wrong Turn and I hated it. Was I wrong? Is my 2021 perspective different? The movie isn't, but perhaps I am a little different.

You have to be of a certain strange mindset to enjoy bad horror movies. Either you have to be excruciatingly stupid or have a keen sense of the sublime ridiculousness. I hope that I fall into the second category. I love bad horror movies. They are cheesy, over the top and hysterically funny. Horror films have no respect for the sanctity of life and act out that disrespect by killing wannabe supermodels as they fornicate. In the case of the slasher flick, Wrong Turn, a pair of gorgeous chicks team with a couple of male models to do battle with West Virginia rednecks.

Chris Finn (Desmond Harrington) is desperately late for a job interview when an accident on the highway forces him onto a backwoods road in search of a nonexistent shortcut. As he fiddles with his CD's and cellphone, he plows into the back end of an empty Range Rover. The Rover's occupants are off in the woods in search of something. Anyway, the reason it is sitting there is that a group of inbred hicks laid out some barbed wire to blow out the tires. Apparently, the redneck economy trades in human flesh because, as the film’s prologue illustrates, the rednecks have killed before, killing and eating a pair of hill climbers, unknown to Chris and his new friends in the damaged Range Rover.

Leaving behind the lesser-known cast members, played by Kevin Zegers and Carly Booth, who should have 'Victim' tattooed to their foreheads, our four leads, Chris, Jessie (Eliza Dushku), Carly (Emmanuelle Chiriqui) and Scott (Jeremy Sisto), wander off in search of help. First stop a desolate but clearly inhabited cabin. This leads to a surprisingly good, very tense scene where our leads flee the cabin while attempting not to awaken the sleeping rednecks, dozing off in the midst of bloody, oozy, super-gross and partially chomped on body parts.

As the leads are paired, it's easy to figure which cast members are most likely to survive and who are likely to meet a grisly end. Knowing that, it's important that the murders be particularly gruesome in order to be entertaining. One of the murders, a simple pair of arrows through the heart, is shocking but not gruesome. The other however, a perfect ax right in the mouth, a perfect head splitting in gruesome and gory fashion is really disgusting and I loved it.

The film’s ad campaign, back in 2003, talked up the participation of effects wizard Stan Winston and they were smart to do so. The makeup and few effects in the film are classic Stan Winston, as gory or possibly even more gory and disgusting as anything Winston had ever done before. Director Rob Schmidt seemed to have had a great deal of fun directing the blood and guts scenes of Wrong Turn. Some scenes you can almost hear him yelling “More blood.” “Make it grislier,” or “can you make that head falling on the floor sound any louder?” Schmidt's direction is like a kid with a new toy in every scene, it's somehow obvious he and his team enjoyed making this movie.

The script for Wrong Turn isn't very original, nor are the performances, but the effort is there. Schmidt covers the horror cliches with as much blood and guts as possible while the actors seem to sense the fun of being in a horror film. Jeremy Sisto, for one, appears to be having a terrific time with his potential victim role. Eliza Dushku knows all about campy horror fun, having guest starred in the best horror franchise in television history, Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Dushku is the perfect mix of horrified potential victim and ready to kick ass avenger in Wrong Turn, though sadly, she is saddled with a little damsel in distress bit towards the end.

The only thing that I really hated at the time, in 2003, and still today really, is the fake out ending. Wrong Turn had a strong, definitive, ending and the twist ruined that specifically so the studio could hedge their bets on a sequel and a franchise. Yes, Wrong Turn did become a franchise, a terrible franchise, but a franchise nevertheless, but it was a real bummer even before the sequels came out and became progressively terrible. I liked the definitive ending, it made what came before it worth it. Retconning that takes some of the fun out of it for me.

By the way, speaking of being unable to a leave a good thing alone, it's only been 18 years since Wrong Turn and already it's been remade. After 5 direct to video/streaming sequels, the owners of the Wrong Turn Intellectual Property have rebooted the franchise with a new, slightly altered origin story that shoehorns in a character played by Matthew Modine, as the father of one of the main 4 characters, who travels to West Virginia to find his daughter who goes missing after attempting to hike the Appalachian Trail.

The all new Wrong Turn was released in January of 2021 and has flown almost completely under the radar, skipping theaters and going directly to streaming before being completely lost. Good riddance, I guess, though it's not hard to imagine that another Wrong Turn reboot is always going to be in our future. Hollywood loves nothing more than I.P and despite everything, Wrong Turn still has some cache today, hence why I was compelled to write about it all these years later.

So, it turns out, yes I am a little different than I was in 2003. In 2003, I was really hard on Wrong Turn. I hated the rednecks because I had seen way too many movies of the past about murderous rednecks. I hated the stars of the movie because they were that cliched brand of way too attractive and predictably rendered in terms of which characters were important and which were obviously the ones intended to be killed.

18 years later, I am much more lenient about the cliches of Wrong Turn. The rednecks are actually a lot of fun, they're gross and horrible and I was grossed out by them years ago. Now, I kind of enjoyed that. I especially enjoyed the gore, which I did also appreciate in 2003. Stan Winston and the gore effects were the best thing about the movie in 2003 and seeing it again, I was impressed all over again. I kind of miss this level of gratuitous violence, it's been out of fashion in recent years so this was a reminder of something I didn't realize I was kind of nostalgic for. I enjoy broad, silly horror movie violence so crazy and bloody that you can't really be afraid of it. Wrong Turn does that really, really well.