Wrong Turn (2003)

A turn down an uncharted dirt road leads six young people into a night of pure terror in this horror story. Chris (Desmond Harrington) is driving through West Virginia on his way to a job interview when an auto accident slows highway traffic to a near standstill. Afraid he'll be late, Chris takes a detour down an old dirt road; a distracted Chris doesn't see an SUV stuck in the middle of the road before it's too late, and he plows into the back after his tires suddenly blow. The driver of the SUV, Jessie (Eliza Dushku), was out on a camping trip with four of her friends -- Evan (Kevin Zegers), Francine (Lindy Booth), Carly (Emmanuelle Chriqui), and Scott (Jeremy Sisto) -- when their tires went out, and as Jessie and Chris compare notes on their accidents, they discover that the road has been sabotaged with barbed wire. With both parties in need of a telephone, Evan and Francine are left to look after the cars while the other four set out to find help. However, Evan and Francine soon discover they've been led into a horrible trap, and as Chris, Jessie, and their friends search for help, they find that they've fallen victim not to local pranksters, but a gang of inbred backwoods killers with a taste for blood. Wrong Turn was produced in part by Stan Winston, a legendary special-effects artist whose work has appeared in such films as Jurassic Park, Aliens, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

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Review By Mark Deming

Wrong Turn is a horror film that thematically hearkens back to a number of groundbreaking terror films of the early to mid-'70s, such as Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and in particular, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with which it shares not only a similar narrative conceit (seemingly normal kids are drawn into the way-scary orbit of a family of beastly "others") but also several set pieces (such as the carnage-strewn house and the creepy automotive graveyard). Unfortunately, director Rob Schmidt draws equally upon '90s teen horror in his approach, casting his leads with photogenically aerobicized teens who appear to have wandered away from some Dawson's Creek knockoff and who spout dialogue that's catty or stupid more often than it's enlightening or functional (especially whiny bride-to-be Emmanuelle Chriqui, whose performance practically guarantees the audience will be pleading for her painful demise). But director Schmidt is also a canny visual stylist who's sharp enough to keep his mood tense and his shocks inventive in the second and third acts, and if Wrong Turn doesn't hold a candle to vintage Tobe Hooper or Wes Craven for sheer disorienting horror (due at least in part to its more polished surfaces), it's significantly more powerful than 90 percent of what's come down the pike in the wake of Scream and it's self-consciously "clever" brethren, and the best moments pack a genuine wallop. Definitely worth a look for genre fans, though you may not want to stick around for the coda, which seems to serve no purpose other than opening the door for a possible sequel.