Horror Movie Review: Wrong Turn (2003)

Wrong Turn is the first in the long running Wrong Turn film series of which there have been 6 to date. Offering nothing in the way of originality, the movie opens showing a pair of rock climbers murdered by unseen killers. It’s a fun opening & quickly establishes a level of brutality with some nice gore.

Sometime later Chris Flynn (Desmond Harrington) is forced to take an alternative route through a forest on his way to a meeting when he ends up hitting another car that is sitting in the middle of the road. Inside the other car is Jessie (Eliza Dushku), Carly (Emmanuelle Chriqui), Scott (Jeremy Sisto), Evan (Kevin Zegers) & Francine (Lindy Booth).

The group are on a camping trip but their tyres were punctured by barbed wire in the road seemingly put there on purpose.

Jesse, Carly, Scott & Chris head off to find help leaving Evan & Francine behind to keep an eye on the cars. A few minutes later, they are both dead. Wrong Turn has no problem killing off people at an alarming rate with little interest in creating meaningful characters.

The others end up finding a cabin that has human body parts inside. Panicking the group go to leave but it’s too late, the cabin dwellers are back. Meetings & camping trips are forgotten about, it’s now just a desperate fight to survive against a trio of disfigured & cannibalistic psychos.

These three are the highlight of the movie. Three Finger (Julian Richings), Saw Tooth (Garry Robbins) and One Eye (Ted Clark) are unremorseful killers who take pleasure in the hunt. We’ve seen their type before in horror (The Hills Have Eyes/Texas Chainsaw Massacre) but they still entertain.

The same can’t be said for the rest of the cast, a bland group barely worth mentioning. They’re fodder for the killers & it’s far too obvious from the start just who will survive & who won’t. The actors are fine, they just don’t have much to work with.

Run, scream & occasionally fight back. Those moments are always the most exciting. The three killers aren’t hulking beasts or supernatural creatures, they are malformed humans, something that the survivors come to realise so they start fighting back.

Gory moments aside, Wrong Turn is an unremarkable horror that entertains in short bursts. Its biggest crime is just how little it tries to distinguish itself from other movies in the genre. Everything it does has been done before. Everything it shows has been shown before even up to its laughably predictable sequel bait ending.