'Do I need to remind you guys," asks Scott the blabbermouth, as his surviving buddies make their way through the West Virginia woods in Wrong Turn, "of a little movie called Deliverance?"
Well, no you don't Scott. Nor The Hills Have Eyes, nor the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, nor more recent slaughter-in-the-backroads epics such as Jeepers Creepers, nor the classic X-Files episode Home, nor anything else ripped off by this derivative, gratuitously violent, empty-headed horror flick.
Scott (Jeremy Sisto) is one of the better-known actors in this B-movie cast, so he's got a small comfort zone in the who-gets-killed-by-inbred-hillbillies-first steeplechase.
The star is Buffy The Vampire Slayer's Eliza Dushku. She's the one in the white halter top, as opposed to her best friend Carly (Emmanuelle Chriqui), who wears the blue halter top.
Other than that, the usual rules apply. Have sex and you're dead. Talk about having sex and you're dead. Smoke pot and you're dead. Has John Ashcroft been writing these scripts in his spare time?
Chris (Desmond Harrington) is a med-school grad on his way to Raleigh, who takes a sideroad after the interstate is blocked by a truck accident. He ends up smashing into an SUV carrying the rest of our young prey, their vehicle having been disabled by a barbed-wire trap.
All this takes maybe seven minutes. And that's pretty much it for the plot, but for the culling of the herd as they make their way to hill-billy ground-zero, a cabin in the woods filled with human body parts and a family of genetic monsters who talk in grunts and whose latex prostheses make them look like characters from Quest For Fire.
And of course, there's the big escape, in which city folk suddenly turn into Rambo. And the de rigeur "The End?" ending.
Director Rob Schmidt pushes standard suspense buttons to competent effect a few times, such as when the bunnies-on-the-run are holed up in the hill-billies' cabin as the owners come home. There are also a handful of over-the-top deaths of the sort slasher fans might be looking for -- an axe in the mouth, an arrow in the eye, a barbed-wire garroting.
Other than that, this is a movie that runs out of people to kill very quickly and seems in a huge hurry to be over. It is, you should pardon the expression, creatively bloodless.
(This film is rated 18-A)
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