The horror film Wrong Turn is not for the faint of heart or the faint of stomach.

It's everything it promises to be and more -- stomach-churningly more.

Somewhere in the woods of Virginia, lives a family of cannibalistic mountain men.

Fortunately for them, people keep taking the back roads, drop in to fish, hunt, hike or climb the hills so they're never at a loss for food.

You might ask why police have never found their hideaway, but that would be bringing logic to a film that exists solely to shock and unsettle its audiences.

The film opens with a scene of a pair of climbers scaling a rock face. The man reaches the top first, chides his female partner for lagging behind then disappears. When he appears again he is crawling toward the cliff trying to escape something that has his face contorted into a grimace of terror.

The movie refuses to let up for the next 80 minutes, bombarding the audience with crunching bones, blood spatter and brief glimpses of deformed limbs dragging mutilated corpses.

No one is pretending Wrong Turn is sweet family entertainment and director Rob Schmidt really piles on the gore in a scene inside the mountain men's cabin.

This flick is reminiscent of such '70s horror gorefests as The Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. As nauseating as those little horror movies were, they both spawned sequels even more graphic, so there is an audience out there for such ghastly horror excess.

The suspense and terror in Wrong Turn is unrelenting and the acting solid for a film presenting caricatures not characters.

Desmond Harrington and Eliza Dushku turn into revenge warriors after their four friends are killed, but even they don't come away completely unscathed.

As long as you don't take a wrong turn and wander into this film thinking it's a run-of-the-mill horror flick, you'll have fun.

(This film is rated 18-A)

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