MOVIE REVIEW

Wrong Turn  (2003)

Starring: Desmond Harrington, Eliza Dushku
Director: Rob Schmidt

Rating: R

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Release Date: 5.30.03

Review Posted: 6.11.03

Spoilers: Minor

By Sara Michelle Fetters

"Wrong Turn Scares in the Right Direction"

Chris (Desmond Harrington, Ghost Ship) is having a bad day. Driving through West Virginia on his way to an important job interview he encounters a major traffic jam on the local interstate. Finding he’s in an area devoid of cellular service, he makes his way to a back road gas station only to find the pay phone out of order and the attendant morbidly unhelpful. Spying a road map on the wall he notices an old dirt mountain road that wraps around the area and leads back to the interstate.

Figuring he has no choice if he wants to make his interview on time, Chris decides to take the road and see where it goes. Unfortunately for him this dirt arterial only leads to more disaster as the frazzled driver smashes his cherry Mustang into a seemingly abandoned SUV. But it isn’t abandoned, instead belonging to a quintet of youthful would-be campers who have found themselves the victims of some backwoods sabotage, their vehicle’s tires getting entwined in a carefully placed strip of barbed-wire.

With things at just about the worst possible place, Chris offers to lead members of the group back to the run-down gas station and see if they can’t find some help. Taking him up on his offer are the headstrong Jessie (Eliza Dushku, Bring It On, City by the Sea) and fiancées Carly (Emmanuelle Chriqui, Snow Day) and Scott (Jeremy Sisto, Angel Eyes). But things can and do get worse as the quartet suddenly find themselves being brutally hunted by an unspeakable family of cannibalistic in-bread killers intent on making them part of their diet. With their remaining two friends chopped into pieces and themselves lost in the woods with no way to contact the outside world for help, can these four find a way to survive?

The better question, of course, is do I care? I mean, it isn’t like director Rob Schmidt (Crime and Punishment in Suburbia) and writer Alan McElroy’s (Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever) new film Wrong Turn covers new ground. Seriously, this is a film where young adults have sex and smoke dope in the middle of the forest right after discovering their car has been maliciously tampered with. Do I really need to spell out what happens to them next?

Yet, Wrong Turn works - seriously works. This is a mighty scary horror film, one of the best pure sit-in-the-dark-and-tell-a-scary-story movies to come down the pike in quite some time. Combining elements of Deliverance, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, Suspiria and Halloween, Schmidt and McElroy ratchet up the tension and suspense without having to rely upon lots of dripping blood and guts, although, Wrong Turn certainly has its share of both.

This isn’t a movie for the faint of heart with brief glimpses of dissected human remains littering the landscape. In fact, one killing in specific is particularly gruesome, a whooshing ax in the night severing an unlucky victim from her body jawbone down. But for all the bits the filmmakers decide to show their audience, there are still umpteen more they leave to our imagination and that’s far more powerfully disgusting than anything either of them could have put on the screen. Like Steven Spielberg handling Bruce the shark in Jaws, the filmmakers realize it is the unseen that is scariest, leaving their glimpses of the film’s family of raucously brutal killers to a bare minimum.

Don’t get me wrong, Schmidt and McElroy are NOT – nor with they ever be – Spielberg. Wrong Turn is nothing more than basic genre filmmaking done well, nothing more, and it isn’t devoid of problems. For one thing, as mentioned before, some of these characters are so particularly daft that they make victims of the Friday the 13th films look like geniuses. Also, this is definitely the type of picture where you can predict whom dies next expressly by their placement in the credit list leaving no room for surprise as to who is going to bite the dust and who is going to be left alive for the obligatory sequel. I also didn’t like Chriqui’s Carly. As written, she’s a hyperly-annoying little twit of a dimwit, and the though of one of the knife wielding cutthroats removing her tongue as to make it impossible for her to talk – let alone scream – started to seem like more and more a good idea.

But so what? Both Harrington and Dushku acquit themselves nicely as the put upon leads, while Sisto has a couple of moments of touching warmth and humanity that I was genuinely surprised they were to be found in nothing more than a B-movie exercise in terror. I should also point out that Elia Cmiral’s (Ronin) crackerjack score is eerily effective. Refusing to resort to the requisite jumps and shrieks of most horror soundtracks, his music resonates creepily because of its subtlety. When those shrieks do in fact then come, they not only got me to jump, but almost put me in the lap of the stranger sitting next to me.

Sure Wrong Turn travels down a familiar road, but it works at exactly what it sets out to do which is to scare the bejesus out of an unsuspecting audience. Refusing to explain the actions of its evil clan or cheapen their scares with self-mocking humor or cheap sensationalism, Schmidt and McElroy have crafted an effectively viscerally charged horror film. This is old-school horror movie filmmaking and for those – like me – who tend to go in for such things, Wrong Turn is the right way to go for a terrifyingly good time.

Rating: 3 out of 4

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