Familiar Theme, Boring Execution
Wrong Turn stars Eliza Dushku and Desmond Harrington and takes place in the hills of West Virginia. Harrington’s character, Chris Flynn, is on the way to an important job interview when traffic backs up due to an auto accident some distance ahead of him. He decides to reroute and go through a desolate path into the heart of the hills and forest of the Appalachians. He inadvertently rams into an SUV that is stopped in the middle of the road. The wreck startles the five young adults who arrived in the SUV a bit earlier. These five people were here to camp, but some barbwire in the middle of the road caused them to pop a tire and they find themselves stranded.
This film reeks of cliched themes if you can’t already tell. A group of young adults, “stranded” (more so by their intelligence than their actual situation) in a remote forest with some kind of evil killing them off. In Wrong Turn’s case, it’s a family of redneck mutated cannibals. As the group of adults discovers, the barb wire wasn’t an accident, it was planted. While out searching for help, they come across a nasty old shack full of human parts and barb wire. This is the cannibal’s home of course, which the young adults soon discover. The rest of the eighty minute movie plays out as you’d expect: constant running with one person getting picked off after another until finally the two lead stars stop the insanity.
If you are a fan of horror movies, this may have some slight appeal to you, but generally speaking it’s a completely predictable and boring affair. Wrong Turn isn’t scary, it’s just silly and you’ll laugh at the cannibals and the stupidity of the characters more so than feel any sense of fear.
The Blu-ray
Fox brings this film to Blu-ray with no new extras and a very mediocre image quality at best. The entire film lacks any kind of visual punch or pop making this seem like a waste on Blu-ray. The primarily dialogue-based audio does fine for itself, but it too isn’t what you’d call ‘demo material.’
As for extra features, the box makes it sound like there is a lot, but their isn’t. I haven’t seen the DVD release of this film, but I’m confident that all of these extra features were on it, too. Included are:
-Audio Commentary with Director Rob Schmidt and actors Desmond Harrington and Eliza Dushku
-Deleted Scenes – Three deleted scenes, all in SD, totaling about seven minutes. Two scenes make up all but about thirty seconds of this feature.
-The Making of Wrong Turn (SD, 4 minutes) – More like a four minute promotional feature.
-Eliza Dushku: Babe In the Woods (SD, 4 minutes) – Behind the scenes footage and cast interviews centering around the female star role of the movie. Yay.
-Stan Winston Tribute (SD, 4 minutes) – This is the best part of this disc. Stan Winston talks about his career and his involvement in films today. He’s the guy that designed the Predator and he talks about that story a little bit and other highlights of his career. Still images and some production footage are shown.
-Fresh Meat: The Wounds of Wrong Turn (SD) – This feature runs about ten minutes and details the work involved in designing and creating the hideous cannibal monsters in the movie. It’s worth a watch.
Let’s get to the summary…