She’s not afraid to put her morality front and centre when things begin to go wrong. And Vega brings us a new Final Girl to cheer on in the shape of Jen. The community’s treatment of those who break their rules is horrific. Calm in demeanour, he holds court to determine the fate of Jen and her surviving friends after a breathtaking moment of savage violence by group hot-head Adam puts everyone in peril.
Nelson and McElroy’s film performs a masterstroke by ditching the cannibalistic humanoids, replacing them with what could be the original doomsday preppers, who just happen to wear the skulls of animals and (possibly) top up their members with unsuspecting tourists.įrom the first shocking moment – reminiscent of a certain death in the Final Destination series – Wrong Turn becomes a survival horror that doesn’t pull its punches.īill Sage (We Are What We Are Hap and Leonard) as Foundation leader John Venable is a wonderfully insidious new villain.
While the set-up feels like familiar territory, the rug is well and truly pulled from beneath us. But there’s something more sinister at work within the boundary walls. For 170 years, they have kept themselves separate from the townsfolk, living off the land. As it so happens, a community of people known as the Foundation fled to the mountains ahead of the American Civil War and set up a new home in the forest. What they stumble upon is much, MUCH worse. Rewind to the start of that six-week period, we meet Jen and her chums – beau Darius (Adain Bradley), Milla (Emma Dumont), Adam (Dylan McTee), Luis (Adrian Favela) and Gary (Vardaan Arora).Īrriving in the town for their adventure, things take an ominous turn when the owner of their B&B warns Jen in an American Werewolf in London style to “stay on the trail, the land is unforgiving.” Unfortunately for our – shock horror! – actually likeable band of pals, Darius wants to veer off track in search of a Confederate fort. It’s been six weeks since last contact with the group and the silence is worrying. In its place, McElroy brings us a folk horror tale that doesn’t skimp on the gruesome deaths while dialling up the creepiness and tension.įor this new iteration, worried dad Scott (Matthew Modine) turns up in a town that acts as an entry point to the Appalachian Trail searching for his missing daughter Jen (Charlotte Vega) and her pals. Gone are the backwoods country bumpkins killing young city folk enjoying the great outdoors for fun. That particular series peaked with Joe Lynch’s 2007 sequel Wrong Turn 2: Dead End.Īfter that, the subsequent follow-ups became an endurance test that struggled to capture the nastiness or inventiveness of the first two.įast forward to 2021 and Alan McElroy, writer of the original film, has crafted a reboot – directed by Mike P Nelson – that (thankfully) does away with the tiresome trope of deformed people being monsters that must be feared and goes in a totally new direction. Taking its cues from a myriad films that came before it, we watched as inbred mutants picked off unlikeable young characters one at a time in creative and disgusting ways. Rinse and repeat.Back in 2003, a new horror franchise was launched in the shape of Wrong Turn. In that respect, this movie excels, because that’s basically all that happens. Whatever, who cares, the people that want to watch slashers just want to see people getting chased and cut up. Oh wait, that’s not unique, that’s a rip off of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The only unique twist on the generic formula is that the antagonists are a family of inbred homicidal hicks. This is a good old fashioned, dumb slasher. Nokia phones, bare midriffs on women, and pooka shells on men. Wrong Turn came out in 2003 and I genuinely forgot how long ago that was. Everyone that you think will die dies, and everyone that you think will survive survives. Some of them have paint by numbers backstories and archetypes, really their purpose and motivation is to be fodder for a slasher. A group of random people in their early twenties are attacked by inbred homicidal mountain men.