Sadly, Wrong
Turn, the latest killers in the woods pic, was not screened
for critics and therefore will never be given a fair break.
The picture is a bare-bones and gristle genre piece that does
exactly what it needs to while not breaking any ground - and
that’s just fine for hot summer months filled with too much
money and not enough entertainment.
The picture starts
in the West Virginia wilderness with the obligatory kill sequence
which just serves to set our genre selection dial. Not a great
scene, but it tells us we’ve entered the slasher world. Not
a horror world. Not a supernatural thriller world. The world
of the most neglected middle child of any genre family. The
slasher.
Once our calibration
is complete, we watch a title sequence montage about missing
people and inbreeding and then check in with Chris Finn (Desmond
Harrington), a young doctor late for an important job interview.
When an accident closes the freeway Chris turns his Mustang
around and takes a dirt road into the woods that should get
him around the logjam. Of course, that change of direction is
a Wrong Turn.
Speeding along the
dirt road, director Rob Schmidt shows why he’s going to make
this movie work and why he should keep working in the genre
for awhile. Chris is distracted by a skipping CD, and then a
dropped CD, then he checks his hair, then he checks his rear
view mirror. The scene goes on just a little too long, which
is how a sting scare has to work.
The second the CD
skips we know that Chris’s distraction will spell disaster for
him; the question is when. That is the core of suspense and
Schmidt does it well. He has the discipline to wait just long
enough to allow the audience to unclench from its initial sense
of the impending scare. As soon as we relax, the sting must
strike, and Schmidt’s timing is impeccable.
Chris’s Mustang
slams into a mountain-bike laden SUV stopped in the middle of
the road. From this accident we meet five young adults; stoner
couple Evan and Francine, newly engaged Scott and Carly, and
newly-single nature lover Jessie (Eliza Dushku). With both vehicles
out of commission and no phones, four of them hoof it leaving
the burners behind.
What comes next
is a well-crafted thrill ride better than any we’ve seen in
a long time. Characters are never asked to do something illogical.
When they come across a creepy shack after finding that their
road out is a dead end they stop and argue the pros and cons
of going in, not just blindly barging in like so many others
in the same situation.
In fact, everything
is handled with as much seriousness and realism as a slasher
picture about good looking 20-somethings being stalked by hideously
mutated inbred hillbillies can be. Entering the shanty is the
start of one of the most intense tension sequences on this side
of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Chris and Jessie cower under
a bed while the backwoods butchers hack up one of their friend’s
corpses. The scene goes on and on while we’re left on the hook
to squirm.
A lesser film, like
most of slasher and slasher-lite pictures of the post-Scream
years, would riddle these tension builders with pop-culture
references and wacky self-reflexive humor. Thankfully, Wrong
Turn has none of that. No one wisecracks while dispatching
a villain.
No one recognizes
the similarities of their events to those in The Final Terror
or The Hills Have Eyes. And why would they? When Scott
(Jeremy Sisto) reminds his traveling companions about a little
movie called Deliverance the rest of characters don’t
seem to even really understand what he is saying. Wrong Turn
hopefully signals the return of the slasher picture dripping
with blood and the end of the horror picture dripping with ironic
detachment, or at least the stirring of a backlash against the
Die Hard style horror flick.
Speaking
of annoying ironic detachment, Buffy-girl Eliza Dushku plays
her tough gal straight and shows that she has the chops to make
the switch to the big screen. Resembling a pretty boy Liev Schreiber,
Desmond Harrington brings a solid intensity to his young doctor,
who thankfully never has to use his healing skills. Sure he
wraps his injured leg at some point, but anyone could figure
that one out. The rest of the cas t carry themselves admirably
with Jeremy Sisto really doing a standout job as the geek of
the group.
Enough about the
hunted, no one left A Nightmare on Elm Street talking about
Johnny Depp and Heather Langencamp; what about the hunters?
Let me pause by saying I have a soft spot for slasher villain
credits. I love that Halloween doesn’t say Nick Castle
was “Michael Myers,” it credits him as “The Shape.” I thrill
at seeing “and Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man” and will always
correct someone when they call Gillman “The Creature from the
Black Lagoon”. So, I was tickled to see the three unnamed hillbillies
credited as “Three-finger,” “Saw-tooth” and “One-eye.”
These three brothers/uncles/nephews/whatever
have set themselves up in the woods as hunters of the upper
class. Their graveyard of victims’ vehicles is littered with
suburban mainstays like SUVs, Volvos and car campers. These
yuppie adventurers have taken one of John Denver’s country roads
home to where they are not welcome. This theme is furthered
through the picture as Chris is derided for being a pretty boy
by a trucker, the interlopers drop disparaging redneck lines
before they know they are in trouble and most tellingly, the
SUV that Chris slams into belongs not to any of the kids but
to the stoner girl’s mom.
With Stan Winston’s
awesome work this trio of cannibals has some creature design
that is simultaneously nothing special and breathtaking. That
may sum up the entire film. The picture is nothing special except
that after a period of dormancy and misfires the slasher movie
returns, not exactly with a vengeance but at very least a mild
annoyance over how its name has been sullied.