Wrong Turn Wednesday:Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead

Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead (2009)
Starring: Tom Frederic, Tamer Hassan, Janet Montgomery, and Gil Kolirin
Director: Declan O'Brien
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

After a clan of mutant cannibals dwelling in the woods of West Virginia cause a prison transport bus to crash, a prison guard (Frederic) must scheme to save himself and a survivor from a previous attack by the cannibals (Montgomery) not only from the mutants but from the vicious criminals to have taken them captive.

In some ways, this is the best entry in this series so far. In others, it's the worst.

In the "plus column" there's the fact that the filmmakers tried to come with something a little different. They mostly dispensed with the usual bunch of Attractive Young People and replaced it with a bunch of escaped convicts and their hostages. The mutant cannibals remain the same--exactly the same as in the previous two films in fact--but the fact that they are preying on predators this time makes for an interesting change. The various plot complications that arise are also different than the usual fare in films of this kind.

In the "minus column" there's the problem that some of the different ideas haven't been implemented all that effectively. The promise of the "cannibals vs. criminals" is never exploited as effectively as it could be, beyond a couple of interesting death scenes. The two lead criminals are established as cunning and skilled killers, and another prisoner is billed as a former soldier, but they don't really do much except to behave like bullies and just talk about taking the fight to the cannibals. While I've no doubt that this is how real criminals behave, it doesn't make for interesting movie characters. There's also the issue that the murder scenes, while gorier, are generally so outlandish or cartoonish that they are more laugh-worthy than horror inspiring--and it doesn't help that many of the gore effects are fake-looking. Finally, the acting ranges from indifferent to bad, with Tamer Hassan and Gil Kolirin (as the lead escaped convicts) being the only really interesting cast members because they are so over the top at all times.

There's also a nitpicky flaw... that being the near-total absence of a "Wrong Turn" anywhere in the story. I suppose if you engage in a logical stretch, the "wrong turn" could be the choice of camp site by the river rafters who become the cannibals first victims this time out. Or maybe the "wrong turn" could be the choice made by our hero when he leads the convicts to the watch-tower and hoped-for safety--this being the watchtower that burned down in the first "Wrong Turn" movie. But both those are quite the stretches to get the event of the title into the film. This then becomes a "Wrong Turn" film without a wrong turn, which is something a poster on my Facebook feed joked about following my review of "Wrong Turn 2". (And while I'm on the subject of the title, who exactly was "left for dead"? Did I miss something?)

Although better in some aspects than the original "Wrong Turn" film, and it gets some consideration for playing with the formula in an even more extreme way than "Wrong Turn 2" did, this sequel is still flawed enough that you can leave it until you've seen all the other mutant cannibal films you can think of. Including "Wrong Turn 2: Dead End"... and for that matter even "Wrong Turn" as it had better acting and the nifty scene in and around the watch-tower.

Wrong Turn Wednesday:'Wrong Turn 2: Dead End'

It's the second Wednesday of 31 Nights of Halloween, so that means it's time for a look at another installment of the Wrong Turn Series.


Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007)
Starring: Erica Leehrsen, Texas Battle, Henry Rollins, Aleksa Palladino, Daniella Alonso, Steve Braun, and Matthew Currie Holmes
Director: Joe Lynch
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

 The contestants and crew of a reality show are stalked by in the deep forest of West Virginia by inbred cannibal mutants who want to add them to the menu.

 "Wrong Turn 2: Dead End" is one of those surprising sequels that improves on the original. While the first "Wrong Turn" movie was a lazy collection of slasher movie tropes, the writers here actually seem to have made an effort to come up with something a little different.

While most of the characters are the usual assortment of cliches you expect to find populating a movie like this--the obnoxious hipster, the sullen goth chick, the slimy filmmaker, the nail-spitting lesbian--there is usually enough of a twist on the character to make it appealing... and if the character itself doesn't have an interesting dimension, the casting and direction is solid enough that you still regret to see the character fall victim to the marauding cannibals.

The most fun character in the film is Dale Murphy, a retired special forces colonel portrayed by Henry Rollins. A typical approach in a film like this is to have the Hollywood-type who appears to be a bad ass turn out to be all bark and no bite when the real danger manifests itself--"Wrong Turn 2" took a different approach and made Murphy every bit the bad-ass he appears as on the reality show, and then some, as well as being a heroic figure to boot. It was nice to see a character take the fight to the psychos immediately instead of waiting until cornered.

The filmmakers even managed to make the reality show conceit work, something which only the minority of the five or six other films that have tried that have managed to do. The set-up and the approach to filming it felt real to me, and the way the show's producer became a contestant and ultimately a victim was also very well handled. All in all, the filmmakers did a nice job of making me buy into the possibility that a reality show could be made like this, and they did an even better job of threading the hi-tech multi-media aspect of that set-up through the entire film.

Now, the film is not perfect. By using the same setting as the first film, they leave a big question out there: How the hell can these cannibals still be running around given the fact they were so thoroughly exposed in the first film? I find it heard to swallow that state troopers didn't flood those woods and raid every cabin spotted from the air or the ground. The easily accessible location where the film's climax took place seems particularly fantastic given the ending of the original "Wrong Turn". There are also several examples of characters being stupid just because if they weren't, the film would be a lot shorter.

But I can forgive those flaws because of Henry Rollins running around kicking cannibal butt. Having his character in the mix really makes this movie for me.

While I can't recommend you waste your time on the first film in this series, I think the fun factor in this one makes it worth checking out. I'm not saying it's a masterpiece, and you're going to need a high level for gore for the sake of gore--but if you didn't, why would you want to watch a movie featuring cannibal mutant hicks in the first place?--but there are worse movies you could waste your time on.

If you end up watching 'Wrong Turn', you may have chosen badly.

Welcome to the first Wrong Turn Wednesday... even if I'm already starting to regret the decision to watch and reveiw these flicks as part of the build-up to Halloween..

Wrong Way (2002)
Starring: Desmond Herrington, Eliza Dushku, Emmanuelle Chriqui, and Jeremy Sisto
Director: Rob Schmidt
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

A group of twenty-something beautiful people are stalked and brutally murdered by mutant cannibal hicks in the deep woods of West Virginia.

If you've seen even one killer redneck movie, you've already seen everything "Wrong Way" has to offer. They may do it better here--depending on what film you watched--but it brings nothing new to this slasher film sub-genre. The characters you expect to survive do so, and the characters you expect to get killed fall in predictable order. The film feels like the writers and director were working form a list of check boxes of genre tropes and once they got them all included, they felt their work was done.

There is nothing all that good about this film, but there is also nothing outright awful. The scene in and around the old observation tower is the high point of the movie (hurh-hurh... I made a pun), but it is nowhere enough to elevate this cookie-cutter, lazy genre film above its mediocre status.

What's more, the good will that scene earns this picture evaporates during the its climax where the filmmakers show us that not only are they not terribly original, they don't know when enough is enough and subsequently manage to transform the final fight stand of the Beautiful People against the Hideous Hicks from thrilling to ludicrous.

(By the way, filmmakers... if you want to make a movie about mutant cannibal hicks who have murdered so many people that they have a whole glade full of cars, you might want to NOT have them start killing cops and forest rangers. I can kinda-sorta accept that everyday people might be written off... but when it's law enforcement that starts going down, my ability to suspend disbelief goes down, too.

Unless you simply can't get enough of malformed cannibals haunting the back-country of West Virginia, or are a founding member of the Eliza Dushku or Jeremy Sisto fan clubs, "Wrong Turn" is a film you can safely skip.