Wrong Turn *** (2003, Eliza Dushku, Desmond Harrington, Lindy Booth, Kevin Zegers, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Jeremy Sisto, Julian Richings) – Classic Movie Review 1112

Director Rob Schmidt’s 2003 American slasher horror movie Wrong Turn is quite capable and stylish and packs a bit of an unpleasantly scary punch, making it stand out from the crowd. It spawned an impressive franchise, which now consists of seven films.

Desmond Harrington stars as 20something Chris Flynn, who is driving his car for a job interview in another city, takes a wrong turn, meets a group of five friends and ends up having to battle Hills Have Eyes-style mutated mountain men hunting them all down.

By 2023 there are six sequels. The series consists of seven films, five of which share the same continuity, while the other two are reboots. The plot of each of the first six films is more or less the same, following various families of deformed cannibals who hunt a group of people in West Virginia, killing them for food in horrific ways, with a mix of traps and weapons. The seventh film reboot Wrong Turn (2021) features a Virginia centuries-old cult that respond violently to outsiders who intrude on their self-sufficient civilisation.

The three main regular characters in the series are Three Finger (Julian Richings), Saw-Tooth (Garry Robbins) and One-Eye (Ted Clark), who in this one stalk a group of six friends. Driver Chris Flynn (Harrington) has to make a detour after a chemical spillage on the road he had been travelling. He looks for an alternative route through the mountains of West Virginia but makes a wrong turn and crashes into another car parked in the middle of the road with flat tyres that’s fallen foul of one of the family’s road traps.

Chris meets a group of five friends, who intended to camp in the forest, and they decide to leave the couple Francine and Evan (Lindy Booth and Kevin Zegers) behind, while Chris, Jessie (Eliza Dushku), Carly and her fiancé Scott (Emmanuelle Chriqui, Jeremy Sisto) try to seek help. But then the group discover a weird cabin in the middle of nowhere belonging to three violent cannibalistic mountain men in-breds, who start to hunt them down one by one as the two couples desperately  try to escape.

Written by Alan M McElroy, this is a grisly, often thrilling chiller, with lots of edge-of-seat tension and suspense, plus some very good big shocks. It all really works quite well, even though it proceeds along such familiar lines.

Three Finger is in all original six films as the main monster but Saw-Tooth and One-Eye don’t appear in 2 and 3 but return for 4 and 5 and 6.

In the sixth instalment, Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort (2014), which serves as a reboot, Danny (Anthony Ilott) discovers his long lost family as he takes his friends to Hobb Springs, a forgotten resort in the West Virginia Hills. Soon Danny’s friends are being killed by his family one by one.

The reboot Wrong Turn (2021), internationally known as Wrong Turn: The Foundation, follows six friends hiking on the Appalachian Trail who become hunted by a Virginia centuries-old cult called The Foundation when they accidentally intrude on the community’s land.

Harrington and Dushku only did the one movie.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 1112 derekwinnert.com