Horror Movie Watch: Wrong Turn

This October, I’m attempting an ill-advised viewing of (at least) thirty-one horror movies. I’ll watch (on average) one movie a day, after which I’ll write some things about said movies on this website. Be forewarned that all such write-ups will contain spoilers! Today’s film is don’t-get-lost-in-the-woods modern classic Wrong Turn (2003), directed by Rob Schmidt and suggested by friend, author, and brilliant social commentator Stacey May Fowles (read her great book, Infidelity).

As always, a special thanks to Queen Video for providing me with the DVD of Wrong Turn. I didn’t check, but they probably also have Wrong Turns 2 through 6, as well.

What happens:

I think I’d melded Wrong Turn with another movie I hadn’t seen from the same era, U Turn, in my mind. So, while I knew this movie starred Joss Whedon muse Eliza Duskhu and was a latter-day American horror film, following from the popularity of I Know What You Did Last Summer and others, I also kind of thought it would be noirish? (That was my mistake.)

Wrong Turn opens with an aerial shot showing a dense forest – there are so many trees in West Virginia – where our story is about to unfold. Two rock climbers scale a cliff face, and the male of the duo, Rich, reaches the top while his rock-climbing partner, Halley, struggles a bit. She asks him to help her up, but hears a ‘galumph’ sound as Rich falls down at the edge of the cliff. Blood drips onto Halley’s face and Rich is hucked over the side of the cliff. Someone or something begins to pull her rope up, and Halley panics. Craftily, she cuts herself free from the rope, but then falls to the ground below, just beside Rich’s body. Luckily, she’s only injured (it was a big fall, but not that big), but as she gets to her feet, she hears eerie cries and movement in the forest at the top of the cliff. She runs for her life, but trips on barbed wire (which is basically my worst nightmare) and then is pulled into the forest.

The opening titles feature newspaper reports and photos about inbreeding, deformity, and murder, aiming for a Texas Chain Saw Massacre feel, then we’re introduced to one of our protagonists, Chris Flynn (Desmond Harrington) a medical student currently stuck in traffic on his way to a job interview in Raleigh. He goes to investigate the sudden stoppage and is told by some unfriendly truck drivers that a trailer jack-knifed and spilled chemicals up the road. Chris returns to his car and turns in the other direction, hoping to find a detour. He dials his interviewers on his cell phone, but his battery runs out. Undaunted, he drives off onto a side road and finds a gas station. The public telephone there is broken, but he finds an ancient map on the wall that seems to indicate a dirt road detour around the highway. The tooth-poor and (also) unfriendly gas station attendant warns, as Chris drives off on the detour, ‘You’re the one who needs to take care.’ (Are you scared yet?)

Engaging in distracted driving (picking up a CD off the floor, gawking at a dead deer at the side of the road), Chris rams into a van parked across the middle of the road. The occupants, unhurt, leap out and start to yell at Chris. The two men and three women were going camping but got lost. Their van is stopped in the middle of the road because they ran over some errant barbed wire. These van occupants include Jessica (Eliza Dushku), newly engaged couple Scott (Jeremy Sisto) and Carly (Emmanuelle Chirqui), and perpetually stoned couple Evan (I know, right?) and Francine. Immediately, I worried for my namesake. As a recreational drug user, he didn’t have long in a horror movie. Jessica (or ‘Jessie’) was recently dumped and her friends wanted to take her for a camping trip to help cheer her up. Tragically, nothing that will happen in Wrong Turn is likely to put a smile on Jessie’s face. The group leaves Evan and Francine with the van as they go to search for help. Shortly into their hike, they discover barbed wire stretched across the road: it was no accident.

While the rest of the group hike and learn about each other – Carly really doesn’t want to elope, Chris displays his biological knowledge by correctly identifying a dead mink – Evan and Francine get high and have an outdoor quickie. (The words, ‘Get them trousers off, Evan,’ were uttered and I got a case of the vapours.) They also go through the doctor’s stuff, and while Francine is rummaging through his car, Evan goes missing. Francine goes into the woods, looking for her stoner buddy, and finds a bloody ear on the forest floor. Backing up in horror, she’s garrotted through the mouth with some sort of razor wire, and it’s pretty unpleasant (but quick).

The remaining living protagonists continue on until they discover an old house in a clearing, surrounded by junked cars. They knock and find no one home, so they debate entering. Chris wants to look for a phone and Carly needs to pee, but Scott, in a moment of self-reflexiveness, says, ‘Need I remind you of a little movie called Deliverance?’ They do, however, enter the old house, which looks like it was frozen in the 1930s. They find an old phonograph and food scraps – evidence of the house being recently inhabited – but also things that don’t match the old-timey decor: multiple car keys, sunglasses, modern children’s toys. As they investigate the house further, Chris finds a fridge full of preserved organs, Jessie finds a roll of barbed wire, and Carly finds a human hand in the tub. But these discoveries are made about a few minutes too late! As they reconvene in the kitchen, they see an old truck barreling towards the house, their own vehicles in tow.

This is a problem. The Scooby gang frantically looks for a place to hide. Scott and Carly hide in a closet, while Chris and Jessie become fast friends by flattening themselves against the ground under a kitchen table. In walk our three villains – deformed mountain men – who dump Francine’s bloody body (razor wire still caught in her mouth) on the floor right in front of Chris and Jessie. They try not to hyperventilate as her blood seeps across the floor and onto Chris’s wrist. The mutant trio then strap Francine’s body to a table and begin to saw her limbs off, as they’ll be preparing her for dinner. (These deformed mountain men are also, naturally, cannibals.)

After their meal, the three cannibal housemates nap – does human meat have tryptophan in it? – leaving Francine’s gory body strapped to their kitchen table. Chris and Jessie quietly creep out from under the table and Carly and Scott follow. While the monsters sleep, they’re going to slip out. They’re almost undone by the rusty spring on the screen door, but Chris heroically stops the spring with his palm, cutting his hand quite badly. Just as they’re almost out the door, one of the mountain men wakes up and Chris shouts to run. The four bolt up a hill while the cannibals hop into their truck. On their flight from the Little House of Horrors on the Prairie, the group comes across a large open field, just lousy with abandoned cars and vans, covered in blood: the vehicles of untold scores of previous victims. ‘How do they get away with this?’ Chris asks, which is a really good question – these cannibals aren’t, like many serial killers, murdering marginalized people without robust social networks; they’re largely killing tourists.

While they marvel at the death toll, the truck pulls into the field, and our four heroes hide behind a van. The cannibals exit the truck and leave it running, which leads the Scooby gang to devise a plan to steal their ride. Chris offers to provide a distraction to lead them away, but while running and hollering, is shot in the leg. (Nice distraction work, Chris.) Scott then offers to provide the second distraction, running in the other direction, and is a bit more successful. As the three cannibals pursue him, Jessie and Carly help the injured Chris get to the truck. They open the passenger door and Evan’s dead body falls out (I knew it), but they push him aside and drive off, looking for Scott. Jeremy Sisto is a really good runner, because he just punches it through the forest. Just as he’s (or Scott’s) about to converge with the other three, driving in the truck, he’s shot through the chest with an arrow, then two others. He collapses to the ground and is dragged off by the cannibal mountain men, forcing the other three to drive on without him.

Obviously, Carly is upset; her fiancé is dead – future food for three very unpleasant people. In no time, the truck runs aground (as if it were a ship), so they’re forced to continue on foot. Jessie has to convince Carly to press on for Scott’s sake, otherwise his death was meaningless. And Chris just barely manages with a makeshift walking stick. (The stick comes in particularly handy when it sets off a hidden bear trap.) Eventually, they find a watchtower and climb to the top. No one is stationed inside, and they can’t see any settlement for miles, but they do find first-aid supplies and some neat lights. Carly also finds an old radio, and the group tries to call for help as night falls. However, they soon see their tormenters travelling by torchlight toward the tower, and kill the lights. Timing is everything, though, and the radio suddenly squawks and a emergency responder asks for their position. The cannibals hear the radio, and set the tower on fire.

Trapped in a towering inferno, the group decides to smash the windows and jump into the trees. There are branches about twenty feet below, and – amazingly – all three catch branches on their jump from the tower. But one of the cannibals is a skilled climber, too – a little spider-monkey, he is – and soon there’s an intense chase through the treetops, our heroes edging along branches and narrowly avoiding arrows. Carly, bringing up the rear, is axed through the mouth and the lower half of her body drops to the forest floor. That’s when Chris sets a trap by pulling back a long branch and using Jessie as bait. It works, and the branch, set loose, knocks the cannibal to the ground – a fall he miraculously survives. Jessie and Chris escape and find refuge in a cave behind a waterfall. The two survivors are able to share a quiet moment, during which Jessie expresses immense guilt: her friends were just being good friends, trying to get her mind off her breakup, and now they’re all dead.

They sleep safely through the night, but are awakened with a start by cannibal-themed nightmares (as you might expect). After a morning hike, they finally come to a road, but the cannibals are hot on their heels, and Chris nearly gets an axe in the head. The cannibals abduct Jessie and shove Chris down a hill. He falls onto the road and flags down a state trooper, who’s been looking for them since the radio transmission last night. Chris tells him that people took Jessie, and just as the trooper asks, ‘What people?’ he gets an arrow through the eye. Chris tries to drive the trooper’s truck away, but more arrows zip toward him. He hides and fakes the mutant bowman out by secreting himself under the truck. The cannibal dumps the trooper’s body in the back of the vehicle, then drives off; Chris, demonstrating the incredible upper-body strength of most med students, manages to hold himself up under the transmission of the truck the entire ride back to the old house.

Back at the house, the cannibals have Jessie tied down to the murder table and gagged, but they’re saving her for later. When the third cannibal arrives with the state trooper, they waste no time in chopping off his head. They then move toward Jessie when Chris drives the trooper’s truck (which is now on fire, somehow) through the front of the house, killing one of the three and setting the whole house ablaze. He then beats another with a tire iron and stabs him through the chest. Chris runs to Jessie and partially frees her from her wire wrist bindings, but then one of the cannibals returns and swings at Chris with an axe. He pins Chris to the wall, and heaves back with his axe as Jessie desperately tries to free her other hand. With seconds to spare, she succeeds and pulls a bow from the wall, firing an arrow right through the cannibal’s head. (Jessie is the original Katniss Everdeen.) But the skinny guy, who pursued them through the trees, isn’t dead yet. He runs in with a baseball bat, but our two heroes are able to overcome him and Jessie buries an axe in his chest. They think their ordeal is over when they realize all three cannibals are slowly struggling to their feet. They’re unstoppable! Jessie begs Chris to shoot them, but he laments, ‘I’ve only got one shot left.’ They back out of the burning building and Chris fires, causing the entire tinderbox of a house to explode.

Two denouements follow: (1) Jessie and Chris pull back into that gas station from the beginning. Chris, beaten and bloody, staggers out and tears off the map from the wall. (2) In a second ending, some hapless state trooper goes investigating the charred house of the cannibals, on his own … at night. (Standard operating procedure, I assume.) One of the cannibals survived the explosion, and he laughs maniacally as he kills the trooper. Fin.

Takeaway points:

• Many other horror films engage in this – Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Calvaire spring readily to mind – but Wrong Turn is especially egregious in its unflattering depiction of the rural poor. Can you think of a horror movie where a southerner living below the poverty line didn’t immediately denote danger? The story of Wrong Turn is, in essence, the story of upwardly mobile, urban young people terrorized and killed by poor, rural people. For no reason, other than – let’s say – inbreeding has made them psychotic and cannibalistic. In many horror films, the killers are given some psychological motivation for their crimes, however flimsy and unrealistic it may be. Or the director and writer may avoid motivation to explore the killer’s particular brand of hatred. In films like Wrong Turn (for it’s spawned four sequels so far), the fact that they are poor Southerners is motivation enough. Aside from the three cannibals, all the working-class and poor southerners are depicted as antagonists: the gas station attendant makes no effort to warn Chris about these killers (who he surely knows about), the truckers despise Chris because his hair is combed (?). Our heroes often make little quips – we sometimes call them ‘microaggressions’ – Carly joking that the next house might have a ‘white picket fence’ or that they need a ‘redneck world atlas.’ Wrong Turn demonstrates the filmmakers’ anxieties of the growing class divide in America, and not in a particularly smart way.
• It can be argued that many horror movies have a problem with women – that is, many display violent misogyny, even as some of them seek to critique that very misogyny. (For many horror films, it’s a murky area.) But the subtext of Wrong Turn seems, distressingly, to tell women they need to shut their mouths. I wish I were making this up, but it’s hard to ignore: Francine is killed by razor wire through her mouth; Carly is killed by an axe through her open jaws; at multiple points in the movie, the male protagonists clasp their hands over the women’s mouths to make sure they don’t scream and alert the cannibal killers to their presence. (The men’s mouths, I will note, remain untouched.) Not to mention that Francine is killed shortly after performing oral sex. There are few movies with a greater oral fixation than Wrong Turn. I don’t honestly believe the filmmakers set out to make a horror film with this message in mind, but it’s certainly there. And certainly distasteful.
• In addition to the other films I’ve mentioned, Wrong Turn also owes a debt to one of the most notorious X-Files episodes of all time, ‘Home,’ which also features an inbred family of killers, and which – while one of the scarier episodes of that show – also has little to say, other than that the world is a terrible place.

Truly terrifying or truly terrible?: Truly terrible. Wrong Turn was – impressively – probably the most reprehensible horror movie I’ve watched yet, and it wasn’t even that scary. The movie aims for Texas Chain Saw Massacre-like depravity and brutality and delivers it, but the total lack of artfulness, the horrible score, and action-movie tropes and pacing make it something that fails to be as scary or meaningful as the movies it references. Instead, it just makes you want to take a shower afterward.

Best outfit: As much as I appreciate Scott’s sunflower necklace – is it a real sunflower or a medallion? – there’s not much else going on in his outfit that you couldn’t find in your average Dave Matthews cover band. Instead, it’s Francine’s purple shorts and zip-up striped belly top that wins the fashion award in Wrong Turn. It works remarkably well with her up-do.

Best line: ‘Say “mayday.”‘ – Carly, coaching Chris on what to do with the radio in the watchtower.

Best kill: Carly’s axe death was pretty neat. Mainly in that the top half of her head remains resting atop the blade, while her lower jaw and the rest of her body topples to the ground. (If that doesn’t make me sound like too much of a creep.)

Unexpected cameo: One of the three cannibals – the skinny guy with the bow and arrow – is, under all that laytex makeup, Julian Richings, who is in nearly every Canadian production ever made (Cube, Orphan Black), but is probably best known as Bucky Haight from Hard Core Logo. Another familiar Canadian face is Lindy Booth, who plays Francine, and is best known for her role in the Dawn of the Dead remake.

Unexpected lesson learned: To quote vocalist Beverly Sills, ‘There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.’ Unless you consider an inbred cannibal’s stomach a place worth going.

Most suitable band name derived from the movie: The internet tells me the three cannibal killers are named Three-Finger, Saw-Tooth, and One-Eye, which could comprise a really excellent hip-hop crew. Like a horror-themed version of TLC.

Next up: House (1986).