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A relatively recent franchise in the world of horror movie series is the Wrong Turn saga. As of today, the seventh movie in the Wrong Turn series appears as completed on IMDb.
This is my review of the franchise as a whole.
For me, in general, it failed to become as big as other horror movie sagas/series. Five wrongs and one or two averages don’t make a right. I don’t personally see a single sequel or prequel in the Wrong Turn series as average horror movies.
Moreover, I see the Wrong Turn movie series as having the potential to enrage horror fans in general and backwoods horror buffs in particular.
A godsend for gore and splatter horror audiences, but borrowing from three older and more established, sub-genres of the macabre. Backwoods horror, and its two banjo-playing, kid brother genres, hillbilly horror, and redneck horror.
I generally classify a movie by how many of its scenes stay with me through the years after watching them. It’s a common way to calculate how good a movie is, and it is a popular way to categorize movies with many movie watchers.
Even if there are many other parameters to judge the worth of a movie, like how true to the genre it is, how much of the film panders to its target audience, or how script, photography, and acting are executed, the generally wafer-thin plots of each Wrong Turn and the shallow and forgettable back-story and characters of the property make for a very disappointing experience.
About the positive aspects of this saga. The filmmakers may have attempted to come up with a great idea, a crossover between splatter horror and backwoods horrors but, even from the first view, for me, it wasn’t really that good. I’d define the final product and general feel of the series as not backwoods horror, but rather popcorn torture porn.
Maybe they conceived the original as a crossover between gore and summer blockbuster. Either way, not taking into account the original, they were all straight to DVD movies. That should raise some red flags already.
I have to give the original Wrong Turn the recognition it deserves. It was released the same year as Saw (2003), and two years before Hostel (2005), probably the two most recognized splatter/torture porn horror movies of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
The first two installments of the series might have been good, but as I watched the subsequent ones, anything I could have treasured from the first became diluted by a hodgepodge of entrails, blood, and predictability. Without any thread to hold the narrative together other than the boorish Hilliker clan’s storyline.
Moreover, I noted the lack of transparency, and disregard for smart backwoods horror audiences in the choice of theme and setting borrowing from backwoods/hillbilly/redneck and never, ever, repaying with a decent, well-thought plot or memorable hero or heroine in a string of six (soon to be seven) movies.
If I had to pick what I would salvage from the series, I’d say WT2, at the top, because of Henry Rollins’ badass/hard-ass part in it, and the original Wrong Turn as second best, and that’s it. I wouldn’t recommend any of the other parts, three to six.
The formula of the first, repeated ad nauseam in the following five, gets progressively boring if one approaches these movies expecting gore, updated versions of Deliverance (1972), Southern Comfort (1981), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), or even Tourist Trap (1979).
Not a single Wrong Turn installment holds a candle to any of those old movies.
If the WT movies attempt at being intelligent or make a pun at casting a hardcore punk legend apposite nobodies to play characters who are also nobodies that always get mercilessly ganked and quartered or minced to non-existence, and about whom you can’t remember a thing later, as if to say that giving the audience someone to identify with and succeed is very last summer, they fail, and not just that, they also insult our intelligence.
Last Thougths on The Wrong Turn Horror Movie Series
I don’t know where Fox is headed with this horror movie series. Like I said at the beginning, Wrong Turn 1-6 are shallow and possibly infuriating for those who love survival horror, hillbilly horror, and backwoods horror.
I would rather watch and re-watch any of the movies I named three paragraphs above instead of losing time with any Wrong Turn movie beyond the second one.
© Bholenath Valsan 2021 — WRONG TURN – Horror Movie Series
