Movie Review: Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007)

 

Sometimes you've got to tell yourself to get your head out of your own ass. For years now, I have thought and spoken ill of Wrong Turn 2: Dead End for no other discernible reason than the fact that it was totally different from the first one. I've mentioned before that I've been listening to The Movie Crypt podcast (almost two months later and I'm FINALLY caught up on over 100 episodes), and one of the hosts of that show is Joe Lynch, the director of Wrong Turn 2. Every time he or Adam Green mentioned that movie on the podcast, I would cringe a little inside because I felt so bad for not liking it. But I honestly had not seen the whole movie in a long time, and after thoroughly loving Joe's latest output, Everly, I knew I would be visiting Wrong Turn 2 again to see if my mind had changed.

In the back country of West Virginia, a group of people enter the woods to film a reality television show about ultimate survival called "The Apocalypse." The contestants and crew soon find themselves in a real-life survival situation when they realize they've entered the territory of an inbred family of mutant cannibals who hunt and butcher humans like animals.

So after catching up with Wrong Turn 2 today, I've concluded that I'm an asshole. There was NO reason for me to hate this movie as much as I have. My initial aversion to it was based on my undying love for the first film, which was a solid, gory, serious film and one of the best horrors of the 2000s. And because of its respectability, when I first saw the sequel, I was really taken aback and almost angry at how quickly the series went the stupid comedy route. But it doesn't. At all. Wrong Turn 2 has a campy vibe reminiscent of 80s splatter films, but it never goes full comedy, and keeps a serious tone throughout.

The cast of characters is diverse, and though you can look at some of them as being cliché, most are very likable. There are the douchebags and jerks in characters like Jonesy and Michael - or as he likes to be called, "M" - and the bitches and stand-offish females like Elena and Amber. Mara, the skittish TV producer, is the red herring final girl who brings out the best in our real final girl, Nina. Henry Rollins plays the host of the reality show, Dale, and he's... well, he's Henry Rollins. Tough and intense, but with a lot of heart. Jake (played by someone with the awesome name of Texas Battle) is also one of the nice, good guys whom you are rooting for to survive. Nina is just the best, though. She starts out the film a little bitchy but grows into your favorite character. She's hot and tough and more than contributes to the demises of the mutants like an awesome final girl should.

The mutant family is an entirely new group from the ones that were introduced in the first Wrong Turn film, indicating that this is like a fucked-up extended family and that there are many more of them out there. The Stan Winston effects work on the mutants in the original really brought those characters to life, and helped differentiate between them. Here, the mutants all look pretty much the same, and their deformities are not nearly as extreme - just some cleft lips and bulbous facial tumors. They also actually speak in this movie, and there is more of a family dynamic with Ma and Pa Mutant and Brother and Sister Mutant, and apparently Three Finger is in here too but I didn't recognize him as easily. It's actually nice to see one other character return from the first film, and the slight expansion of his involvement with the mutants. All of the mutants are still disgusting and unrelentingly brutal in their kills, and that's really what we want to see with the Wrong Turn sequel.

The gore in Wrong Turn 2 is just great. I always remembered the film mostly for Kimberly Caldwell's death in the beginning where she gets split in half height-wise. Right off the bat this establishes the kind of movie this is going to be - maybe when I first saw it, I didn't have the same level of appreciation for these films like I unabashedly do now. There's a nasty mutant birthing scene, an even nastier mutant incest sex scene, and many other scenes that are just full of intestines and tons of blood and it's all awesome. The only disappointing thing is when certain characters die that you don't want to - like, how the hell can you kill Henry Rollins? Especially when he becomes the deus ex machina and saves Nina and Jake's lives? Ugh, that sucked. Really wanted Rollins to live. Otherwise, there are lots of nice deaths with arrows, knives, and of course the absolute best part at the end with the huge grinding machine thing - Wiki says it's a tree debarker, so that's cool. There's also dynamite. And people getting blown up with the dynamite. That's tits.

So hopefully this review serves as a good apology for any shit-talking I have done about Wrong Turn 2. It doesn't suck! It doesn't suck at all, and I don't know what I saw all those years ago that made me think that. Joe Lynch, I am so, so sorry. The movie is great, and I'm glad I gave it another chance, something I should have done a long while ago.

Project Terrible: Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead (2009)

The first Wrong Turn film from 2003 is undoubtedly one of the best horror films of the last decade and one of my personal favorite horror films of all time. That's probably the reason why I was so disappointed by Wrong Turn 2: Dead End. Admittedly, I shut it off halfway through simply because of the dramatic shift in tone and style from the first one - it made me a little angry, sure.

Knowing all this, a person whom I thought was my blog buddy, Maynard of Maynard Morrissey's Horror Movie Diary, gave me Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead as my movie for Project Terrible. I was dreading this movie like nothing I've ever dreaded before. I knew it was going to suck, knew it was going to be nothing but retarded characters running around the woods and getting killed. Blah.

So here's the thing. It almost pains me to admit it and Maynard is gonna make me eat some words here, but I actually didn't hate this movie. At least I didn't hate it as much as I did the second film and this one is no way as good as the first, but it had enough of what I like in a horror movie - a quick story and fun gore - to make me dig it a bit. But this is Project Terrible and I'm going to start the review with what I didn't enjoy so much about the movie.

This is probably the only time I will show
partial boobs on my site.

The story is more involved than I thought it would be, and sometimes not in a good way. The movie starts off with quite a bang as four kayakers are almost immediately dispatched of by our favorite hillbillies (well, three kayakers - one escapes and shows up later). Then we get into some weird story of a prison transfer and a guard's last night on duty and a prisoner's plan for escape during the drive to another prison. This brings about some annoying scenes of the prisoners - Chavez and Floyd - fighting and backstabbing over and over and over and OVER again. It gets even worse when the group randomly finds in the woods an old armored truck full of money.

These parts also get quite irritating when there is constant fighting over the money and the prisoners making the guards and Alex, the survivor from the kayak massacre, carrying the money through the woods as the main guard, Nate, leads Chavez to a phone or something so he can contact his "boys." The group gets picked off one by one by the 3 Finger mutant and after each death, it seems like there is yet ANOTHER fight over the money and whether or not the prisoners should kill the others. Just make up your mind already, seriously. Then that whole side story suddenly doesn't matter anymore when the money gets burned up by 3 Finger. Oi, how annoying.

The biggest sour note to this movie has to do with the special effects work. The main thing is that the mutants are simply not as well done as in the original film. Granted, Wrong Turn had the genius of Stan Winston behind those mutants and they looked freaking GREAT. The bad teeth, the bulbous and deformed hands, heads and limbs (I always loved the guy with the hunchback) all made these guys truly grotesque and terrifying.

The Wrong Turn 3 bad guys, however, not only don't have the same quality makeup as before, but the mutant family has dwindled down to just two members, and later on only the mutant known as 3 Finger is left to do all the carnage himself. This was a disappointment because to me, one guy is not really as scary as three.

The good part about this movie was most of the death scenes. The original film was pretty much all hack-and-slash with axes and arrows but this one pumps that up much more. Three Finger has set up booby traps in the woods - including an "egg slicer" that slices an guy's entire body into three pieces and a trap on his truck that encases a guy in wire then hoists him up so 3 Finger can drag him down the street. Niiiiiiiice. There are also some nice impalings like a pipe through the mouth and an arrow through the boob and eye for one poor girl.

However. The CGI blood sucked. Especially on the egg slicer death which was cool in theory and got hokey at the end when the guy split apart and there was very obvious CG blood spurting up from his body. But this was the only part where it really bothered me, thank goodness.

Small question: What happened to the female deputy? I'm thinking that she was the half-dead naked girl all twisted up in barbed wire inside the mutants' house but I couldn't tell for sure. Anybody got word on that?

I'm seriously shocked at how much I liked this movie. Though it falters a bit in story, the action is well-paced and the gore is inventive and, for the most part, fairly well done. The first film in the Wrong Turn series is still at the top of the pack for me while the second one is well below the bottom of the pack. I'd say the third is at about a happy medium.