Hello, BBSers! I am here to tell you about yet another film you must avoid.
Enter: Wrong Turn, a 2021 film.
This movie is a reboot of the Wrong Turn franchise. I have not watched any
of the others, but the franchise is known for their plots regarding people who gets lost in the forest and killed in gruesome ways.
The film itself is a slasher horror flick with a simple enough premise. A group of millennial city folks visit a Southern town on vacation, and upon ignoring the advice from the locals, get lost in the surrounding forest. What follows is the systematic killing of the members of the group, who fall one by one to the mysterious force that inhabits the forest.
The production values are barely sufficient, and at times you will want to strangle the director. Many scenes feature people who disappears from the take mysteriously without anybody else noticing in such a way that it feels forced. I think it is done deliberatedly, but it makes the direction feel amateurish. The action scenes are also so-so at best, with lots of cuts going on.
Slashers like this don't have much going for them, so the only way they can keep interest is by one of two methods: having awesome deaths, or having awesome characters. The deaths are usually ok. None is very imaginative (such as in the Chucky movies) but none feels like a way to insert cheap gore. The gore is better managed than in many modern horror films, which are based on showing lots of guts spilled on the floor. There are crushed skulls and mutilation, but it does not feel like those elements were included just to please fans of gore content.
If the deaths are ok - although in my opinion, not enough to carry the weight of the film - the characters kill the movie.
The first thing to be noticed is that the main characters are your standard cardboard cast, built from token minority members. Token minority members would not be a problem if they were something other than that, but it turns out they aren't. The Black is The Black but has no further depth. The Gay Couple is the Gay Couple and their only role in the group is to be the Gay Couple. The only one who gets some character is The Heterosexual White Male, who happens to double as The Asshole. I am sure you can see where this is going.
This also spills to secondary characters, specially the Southern Rednecks.
In fact, the film tries to build tension by pointing out that Southern Rednecks frown upon the main characters because that is what Southern Rednecks do. The film tries to capitalize on the conflict between city slickers and rural rednecks in a very in-your-face way.
In other words, all the characters, no exception, invoke the 8 deadly words: "I don't care what happens to this people."
In the light of such information, my advice is to skip this movie by any means necessary.
Thanks for reading.
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