Susan Granger's review of "Wrong Turn" (20th Century-Fox)
There are bad movies and then there are inexcusably bad movies. This grim, gruesome, blood-drenched '70s-style slasher scenario falls into the latter category.
The story begins as a yuppie (Desmond Harrington) finds himself stuck on a West Virginia highway en route to a job interview in Raleigh. Impatient, he makes a U-turn and heads down a dirt road where he, literally, runs into a disabled Range Rover and a quintet of twentysomethings (Eliza Dushku, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Jeremy Sisto, Kevin Zegers, Lindy Booth).
Bear Mountain Road is obviously the road less traveled - except by an ominous, demented trio of mutant, in-bred mountain men who turn out to be cannibals. Ordinarily, one might be rooting for the protagonists to survive but, in this case, they're too dense and dimwitted to elicit much sympathy as one-by-one they're slaughtered. The gals are clad in tight tank tops - the better to jiggle, of course. One guy is so dense that when he finds himself in a decrepit cabin filled with bizarre oddities and disgusting debris, his first impulse is to turn off a spinning record-player.
Written by Alan B. McElroy ("Spawn") and directed by Rob Schmidt ("Crime and Punishment in Suburbia"), it's strictly bottom-of-the-barrel except when one of the men mutters, "Remember those guys in 'Deliverance.'" Now that's perceptive. Otherwise, John Bartley's cinematography and Elia Cmiral's music are pedestrian, at best. Credit any shred of interest to four-time Oscar-winner Stan Winston who designed the freakish make-up. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Wrong Turn" is a brutal, grisly, gory 1. Bad directions are the least of its problems. Hmmm, I wonder how the West Virginia Board of Tourism feels about this.
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