Wrong Turn (2021)

Movie Info

The Foundation are proven liars…no moose or elk in the area…At least that deer is local

Jen Shaw (Charlotte Vega) and her friends Darius (Adian Bradley), Adam (Dylan McTee), Milla (Emma Dumont), Gary (Vardaan Arora), and Luis (Adrian Favela) are hiking the Appalachian Trail.  When they leave the trail to find an abandoned Confederate fort, they find the Foundation instead.  The Foundation have lived alone since before the Civil War…they have no disease and little contact with the outside world.  Jen and her friends have crossed the barrier and now there is no turning back.  When Jen doesn’t return, her father Scott (Matthew Modine) goes looking for her, and he finds a nightmare.

Directed by Mike P. Nelson, Wrong Turn (also called Wrong Turn:  The Foundation) is a reboot of the horror survival.  Following Wrong Turn 6:  The Last Resort in 2014, the film was scheduled for a 2020 release but was delayed due to COVID-19.  It received mixed to positive reviews.

I spy with my hollowed out eyes…nothing

Wrong Turn was never my bag.  I got its appeal, and I liked it was a horror ’80s throwback, but it wasn’t very good.  The new Wrong Turn isn’t really a Wrong Turn movie (there is even a meta moment referencing the original films).  The movie instead is a cult movie.

The movie oddly plays out more like the much panned The Island from the 1980s combined with The Village.  Both of those movies featured people surviving outside of society without people knowing about it…to a fault.  Like The Village especially, Wrong Turn doesn’t make much sense in that the Foundation is less than a day’s walk from the heavily travelled Appalachian Trail and near a town on the trail.  While I don’t mind how the story unfolds, the suspension of disbelief is too high (especially if a group of mostly white millennials disappeared from a known location…the media and state police would be searching for them)…the worst kept secret of the Foundation would be out quickly.

The movie has a relatively young cast most of which are forgettable.  There is of course the two irritating character Adam (Dylan McTee) who is the loudmouth and Milla (Emma Dumont) who is the trouble prone group whiner.  Fortunately, Charlotte Vega is a solid lead and she’s teamed with veteran actor Matthew Modine as her father and Bill Sage as the creepy leader of the cult.

I’ve had a really crappy “find yourself” trip

The movie looks pretty good.  It is violent, but less violent than some of the earlier entries (though the violence does feel a bit more “real” than some of the previous entries almost cartoon violence).  The movie replaces “redneck monsters” for “wood-survivor people”.  It leads to a colonial type set that doesn’t quite get used enough.

I admire Wrong Turn from turning far away from the original source material when creating a “reboot”, but I also think that this decision probably won’t gain fans (if you didn’t like Wrong Turn, you probably aren’t going to see another movie of the same title) and if you did like the Wrong Turn series, it probably will be a bit of a disappointment since it is so different.  It seems like just starting a new movie franchise would have been the better choice.  Wrong Turn has endured so far so I’m sure that we’ll go back to the woods again sometime.

Related Links:

Wrong Turn (2003)