Wrong Turn (2003)
Directed by Rob Schmidt
Written by Alan B. McElroy

Wrong Turn should really be just another run-of-the-mill teenagers-lost-in-the-woods slasher flick, but it turns out to be quite a bit above average for this genre, courtesy a relentless pace and an almost nihilistic approach to killing off its characters.

The story follows a group of college kids who break down in the backwoods of West Virginia, apparently a no-man's-land of monstrous, inbred sociopaths with insatiable bloodlust, and little police interference. The film plays off the overblown collective fear of hillbillies that has fueled many a horror film before (The Hills Have Eyes, Cabin Fever) and will continue to do so, I have no doubt.

Where this one succeeds is its complete commitment to heart-pounding scare sequences – there's almost no situational set-up or character development, just constant chasing, killing, and screaming, relieved, at most, by forboding creepiness.

The rather raw and intense performances help a lot (Eliza Dushku is excellent), and even when the film resorts to stock slasher clichés, it resists the most predictable avenues and manages to keep scaring the bejesus out of you.

A couple of unfortunate gaps in logic toward the climax render the payoff less powerful than it might have been, but at least the film doesn't overstay its welcome. I had nothing but skepticism about Wrong Turn going in, but surprisingly enough, it's the tightest and most genuinely scary horror flick I've seen since recently, even better than the snuff film I made in which I killed a couple of babies with a Flo-Bee®.

Review by Thomas Long-and-Strong