Nope, this time, we're not dealing with hillbillies, we're not dealing with cannibals, nor a combination of the two, but we are dealing with almighty gore that comes with a "Wrong Turn" movie!
The Appalachian Trial (or the A.T.) travels through fourteen states along the Appalachian Mountain range from Georgia to Maine. According to one avid hiker, “three to four million people hike the trail each year”, and since 1937, there have only been 10 killings on the trail”
You ask me, though…. I think I’ll stay away… course, I like to stick to the trail, why do people ALWAYS go off trail. American Werewolf in London, Blair Witch, the Dwarfs and Billbo in the Hobbit, the Ritual, Wolf Creek, and Wrong Turn (2021)…
Jan 2021
Director: Mike P. Nelson
Cast: a handful of new(er) actor/actresses: Charlotte Vega (Jen/main character), Adain Bradley (Darius – Jen’s boyfriend), Bill Sage (Venable – leader of “The Foundation”), Emma Dumont (Milla), Dylan McTee (Adam – Milla’s boyfriend), Daisy Head (part of “The Foundation”), Vardaan Arora & Adrian Favela (Scott and Gary – boyfriends), Tim DeZarn (Local Yokel - also in Cabin in the Woods as a local yokel) and…. wait for it…. Matthew Modine (Jen’s father Scott).
(Rent or Purchase on multiple streaming services)
Let’s break this down…
2003 – Wrong Turn: West Virginia – horde of backwoods cannibals
2007 – Wrong Turn 2 Dead End: West Virginia for a survival-themed reality show – homegrown band of cannibals
2009 – Wrong Turn 3 Left for Dead: West Virginia a bus of convicts run off the road –cannibalistic hillbillies
2011 – Wrong Turn 4 Bloody Beginnings: Snowmobilers in West Virginia – deformed cannibals in an abandoned sanitarium
2012 – Wrong Turn 5 Bloodlines: Mountain Man Festival in West Virginia – Inbred hillbilly cannibals
2014 – Wrong Turn 6 Last Resort: West Virginia – cannibalism family
And then we come to 2021 Wrong Turn – a group of friends hiking on the A.T. and… go off trail and have a run in with ‘The Foundation’
As I mention, right out the gate, those who stray from the trail... no good comes of it. Now in this instance, however, I don’t know that it actually would have made all that much a difference had they stayed on the trail.
You kind of know what you are getting into when you watch a Wrong Turn movie, right? Lots of gore, and at some point along the way, a wrong turn. So I know, you’re saying, “this isn’t Reeses Pieces typical pick of a movie, there are no ghosts, no haunted houses, and no possessions. So, we (Brian and I) waded into this movie with different expectations. Given the fact that it’s the seventh installment, and we know it’s going to be a man vs. man…. Not that there is anything wrong with that genre, just not my usual.
As you might expect, a group of young adults (Gen-Z-ers) want to spend their trip hiking the A.T. and start off in a… you guessed it… little town with foreboding townsfolk that sets the tone for the movie. They get the all-too-familiar ominous warning from the local yokel about the mountains, that no one takes seriously, and off they go into the mountains.
After hours of hiking and seeing some quite honestly amazing terrain, they veer off trail to find some off-trail sight-seeing area (mind you, this group doesn’t have maps or a compass that I could tell, a MUST whenever you go hiking, and they decide to blindly find this area in the middle of nowhere), and then, they find themselves LOST! Whaaatttt!!!!
Okay, I’m being a little sarcastic as you can guess, the story line is not like doing brain surgery or rocket science.
I’ll continue…
Of course, this is when the trouble begins, and at first a terrible mishap seems to maybe just be a tragic accident. But we know better, don’t we..
So, they’re lost, had a tragic accident and so when they realize that they’re not getting out of the woods that night, they set camp. Luckily, even though didn’t pack maps or any wayfinding equipment, they DO have a tent and sleeping bags.
When they wake up, they realize that they set camp in a graveyard and that one of their group is ‘missing’ and this is when the S&%T really hits the fan and travels downhill so fast you won’t know what hit you, or them… (and by that I mean, they start confronting “The Foundation”).
Let’s side bar here for a minute, all the previous Wrong Turns have unsuspecting groups of people encountering Hillbillies, Cannibals, or a combination of the two (don’t those just go hand in hand)? Anyway, in this installation, the protagonist is a group of intelligent people living off the grid in a commune dating back to Civil War time and they developed this way of life with the belief that mankind was going to eventually destroy itself and they would outlast the devastation. The most important part, they will kill to defend it.
With a rather diverse set of characters now under attack by "The Foundation" in the middle of the woods they can’t find their way out of, we start losing the characters one by one, but the story line does a bit of a headstand when "The Foundation" brings the remaining friends into their camp and put them on trial, for what, I’ll let you find that one out yourself, but "The Foundation" poses the question to them (and us??), who really is the barbaric one? Contemplate that …
So, the second half of this movie then skips out of the woods to follow Jen’s Father who is in a desperate search for her. I will tell you that he finds her, you don’t have to worry about that
I don’t (and hope that I haven’t) given much away, I feel speaking in general terms about a story line that is pretty much paint by numbers (for the most part) won’t. But what I will say is that even given the paint by numbers fact, the numbers don’t finish in the order you expect. That is to say, the movie is a pretty good one, given that fact, and you have to watch the entire movie. Period…. I would recommend it. No spoils here!!!
I will say this, The Foundation must have a really good stylist because Bill Sages character, Venable, looks very put together for living off the grid… just sayin.
My Bloody REEL REVEIW:
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