Rating: C+
Dir: Rob Schmidt
Star: Eliza Dushku, Desmond Harrington, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Jeremy Sisto
The “teens in peril” film is a three-word genre, where the name sums up the entire movie. The location may change; the threat may vary; but the style and content remain much as laid down in Friday the 13th, or even before that, in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Thirty years on, we still have kids going into apparently derelict houses, and every viewer still screams “Get out!” at the screen, because both we and the soundtrack composer are several steps ahead of them, even before we find the fridge full of…well, let’s not spoil all the surprises, shall we? I’m sure you can guess.
Still, for what it is, Wrong Turn isn’t so awful, and left us crossing rural West Virginia off our list of potential holiday destinations [though a) it wasn’t there to begin with, and b) the film was actually shot in Canada] Here, two cars collide, throwing the young, photogenic cast up against a clan of cannibalistic mountain-men with absolutely no mercy – except when they capture Dushku, naturally. From here, it’s a question of, as TCM put it, who will survive, and what will be left of them? With one exception, the answer is “exactly who and what you’d expect”. To the film’s credit, most of the characters don’t behave too idiotically, and Sisto actually seems like a reasonable guy – in this field of screams, that’s something of a rarity.