Let’s see what we’ve got on the horror-film checklist: Nubile young teens? Check. An isolated location with no modern means of communication? Check. No way out of this location? Check. Someone (or something) with an insatiable appetite for flesh and blood? Check. Yep, we’ve got ourselves a formula horror film. But, at least this time out, it’s played straight and it almost works. Almost.
Chris (Desmond Harrington) is on his way to Raleigh, North Carolina — by way of the West Virginia backwoods — for a job interview. A traffic jam has forced him to take an isolated back road to get back on schedule. While momentarily distracted by a malfunctioning CD player, he crashes into the back of a truck full of young campers. Their vehicle was disabled by barbed wire stretched across the road.
The campers, including the tough Jesse (Eliza Dushku, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the whiny Carly (Emmanuelle Chriqui), Scott (Jeremy Sisto, of Six Feet Under and Thirteen) and stoners Evan (Kevin Zegers) and Francine (Lindy Booth), decide with Chris that since they’re now stranded in the middle of nowhere that they should try to find a phone and get help. (Of course, Chris has a cell phone, but it can’t get a signal.) They find a house that’s full of a lot of weird and gruesome things and — shock of shocks — it turns out to be the home of three inbred redneck killers.
I wasn’t expecting great things from Wrong Turn, so I wasn’t terribly disappointed when I didn’t get them. This is simply an adequately suspenseful, by-the-numbers horror film with an attractive cast of stupid characters and a few genuine scares. For hardcore gore fans, there are a number of interesting special effects and innovative kills, but nothing spectacular. You could do worse than to rent Wrong Turn, but it’s not that hard to find something better.
2.5 out of 5.0 stars
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