Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Wrong Turn’ on VOD, a Horror Remake With Lots of Gore and a Little Political Subtext

The Wrong Turn franchise takes another turn with a new reboot — now on VOD platforms — bearing the same old title (although it’s known internationally as Wrong Turn: The Foundation). The new film is notable for two reasons: One, a screenplay by Alan McElroy, who wrote the original 2003 movie, but wasn’t involved with its five sequels. And two, MATTHEW MODINE WITH A BATTLEAXE. If that latter item isn’t enough to lure you in, please note that the film likely features more caved-in skulls per square inch than any other movie in history, which may sweeten, or sour, the pot for you.

WRONG TURN (2021): STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Scott (Modine) drives his Nissan into a quaint burg in rural Virginia and starts asking the locals if they’ve seen his daughter. Six weeks ago, she and some friends went hiking on the Appalachian Trail, and he hasn’t heard from her since. He sidles up to the bar next to a white guy with a neck that isn’t white and shows him her photo. The barfly stops pulling on his bottle of Blatz to give Scott the standard-issue movie-redneck warning: “Yeah, I seen ’em. Goddamn yuppies. They’re lost in ’em woods. You ain’t never gon’ find ’em.”

Subtitle: SIX WEEKS EARLIER. The daughter, Jen (Charlotte Vega), and her five pals pull into that same quaint burg in rural Virginia, and start smearing their liberal-millennial Brooklynite horse puckey all over the place. She’s dating a Black man, Darius (Adain Bradley). Luis (Adrian Favela) and Gary (Vardaan Arora) are a gay couple. Milla (Emma Dumont) and Adam (Dylan McTee), being a Caucasian pairing, might help deflect the local side-eye action if he wasn’t so vocal about pigeonholing these humble hardworkin’ folk as unwashed inbred hillbillies. Despite numerous dire warnings by everyone to stay on the trail, they don’t stay on the trail, possibly because Scott wasn’t a cool enough parent to make sure his daughter and her friends saw Deliverance and The Hills Have Eyes.

So as they meander through the lovely, mossy deciduous forest, we get a third-person stalker-POV shot complete with heavy breathing, so it’s really only a matter of time until a skull gets caved in. Before they know it, they’re traipsing through a conveniently clear section of the woods, an ideal section of the woods for a massive log to roll down and maybe cave in some annoying twentysomething’s skull. Which is exactly what happens, and it sucks, but it may not suck as bad as what’s about to happen, which involves booby traps, kangaroo tribunals and medieval torture. Maybe if they’d been nicer to the townsfolk, the townsfolk might’ve been less vague with their dire warnings, and told them there’s a whole clan of wackjobs out there living a primitive life and wearing antlers like hipsters wear ironic knee-high sweat socks. So what we have here are some big ol’ ideological differences, which means it’s time to start counting down the dead millennials and tallying the smashed headbones.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I already mentioned Deliverance and The Hills Have Eyes, but we should toss in a bit of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (“folk horror” like this wouldn’t exist without it), and some hey-don’t-judge-us-for-our-cultural-differences gaslighting like we saw in Midsommar.

Performance Worth Watching: Vega is very much worthy of being the film’s emotional fulcrum, showing grit and toughness balanced with empathy and kindness. She’s an excellent funnel for the film’s thematic ambitions, messy as they sometimes can be.

Memorable Dialogue: “The sentence… is darkness!” — The man in the credits known as Ram Skull

Sex and Skin: Nothing worth mentioning.

Our Take: Per this Wrong Turn, a lot can happen in six weeks, including, but not limited to, the diamond-hardening of one’s spirit and the development of significant archery skills. So let’s just say the movie’s plausibility factor plummets as it goes along. Not that plausibility is the goal — part of some horror films’ success hinges on rendering the most awful shit to be all too real. There’s some of that here, sure, what with all the various convincing displays of crushed, smashed, splintered, obliterated, bludgeoned, pulped and gooified skulls, and I haven’t even counted the ones that got stabbed.

More interesting perhaps is how McElroy and director Mike P. Nelson explore the idea of prejudice through a variety of character dynamics. Nobody here, from the small-townsfolk to the dumb young hikers to the antler-wearing people in the woods, is necessarily a simplistic stereotype; all show degrees of vulnerability to kindness, which is the kind of can’t-we-all-just-get-along sentiment you don’t necessarily expect from a horror movie bursting with gruesome slaughter. Thankfully, it doesn’t insist that we should accept the patriarchal mini-society with a violently xenophobic attitude towards modernists and a barbaric sense of judicial punishment for who they are, because they’re surely not on equal moral footing with the moonshinin’ AR-47/Confederate flag types and the condescending and privileged white-collar youngsters. There are varying levels of dysfunction here, and all of a sudden this conversation has veered into political territory, because America 2021 and late capitalism and all that, and it’s all certainly intentional, because Nelson chooses to run a version of the song America the Beautiful over the end credits.

I pause to take a breath: McElroy’s screenplay doesn’t always cohere as a firm socio-political metaphor, but at least it’s somewhat intellectually provocative on top of the horror and suspense tropes. Taking the twist-riddled climax (one nifty one and one very, very cheap one) and denouement into account, I’ll assert that the latter elements are the goal, because the film ultimately opts for surprise — and chilling imagery, all-too-convincing gore, decent the-trees-have-eyes jump scares and effectively taut suspense — over logical coherence. Notably, Modine wields his battleaxe with dead seriousness, not in the irony-drenched way Nicolas Cage might, so the movie is good for a laugh or three, too, be it intentional or not.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Wrong Turn reboot isn’t going to cave our heads in — it’s a little too sloppy and derivative at times to be essential viewing. But its unpredictability and ability to inspire a visceral response makes it worth a watch.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Wrong Turn (2021)