Wrong Turn (2003) - 2.5/4

Imagine you open your eyes and see before yourself a dog standing on a beach ball and being chased by a clown. Yes, you're at the circus; you'd just nodded off. Suddenly, in your drowse-inspired detachment, you're struck by the realization that the universe has been developing for billions of years according to unbending laws of physics so consistently, so unerring, so determinately that it could be said the entire universe has led up to this point: the clown and the dog on a ball. Granted countless other things are occurring in the universe simultaneously; but it did take billions of years for you to watch a dog on a ball. One can be extremely amused by the mock-epic implications; one can also be a little disappointed in the universe. It's such a trivial thing to spend billions of years working towards.

Fifteen minutes into Wrong Turn, I knew I'd feel a similar disappointment. The plot is simple: a doctor takes a shortcut through West Virginian woods to avoid a traffic jam, strikes an unexpectedly-placed SUV, and the whole group that goes looking for a phone is hunted by violent, inbred hillbilly cannibals. The moment I noticed three girls and two guys in the SUV group, I knew who would survive the film. But with that prediction (an accurate one) came this disappointment: that all the horror, violence, agony, death that occurs within the film does so just so the handsome, square-jawed man and the pretty, resourceful woman can 'get together.' This is the unspoken progression of the film. All the premises and how they work out leads to this conclusion: the handsome man and the pretty girl develop a romance.

I don't mean to imply Wrong Turn gives us pointless love scenes: it never does. But the film does conclude with the surviving pair together. It was predestined. The moment we spot Eliza Dushku, we realize she exists for the doctor and he for her. They're written that way. And everyone else, who should have a separate and meaningful-in-itself existence actually exists for these two to get together. The ordeal doesn't take on any symbolic implications for the implausibility of any two people coming together; it is concrete, particular, regarding these two people in this universe set up just for them. Because in the movies, pretty yuppies getting into a relationship is the most important thing in the universe. Hence my disappointment. Like the dog on the ball, to end the film on the predictable couple getting together and driving off into the sunset seems to trivialize all the came before; it trivializes the characters, the events, the horror all.

A more interesting though no less predictable film with a similar progression is House of Wax (2005). While that film also subordinates the existence of all other characters and all the events to the relationship of a brother and sister, it seems somehow more meaningful. Their relationship, for one, predates the events we witness and, while hardly well-developed, has a specificity to the characters. The relationship in Wrong Turn is entirely generic; it is, as I said, handsome man and pretty woman, but nothing more.

The said, the film offers some exciting chase action, including a siege on a fifty-feet-high watchtower and a battle in treetop branches. The success of these chase sequences depend very much on setting logic far aside. If Johnny is so inbred he can't learn spoken language, how likely is it he'll be a master archer or as nimble as Tarzan? These hillbillies should be club-footed special-care charges barely able to feed themselves. Yet, as is so often the case with the Hollywood depiction of hillbillies, the only parts damaged by inbreeding are the face and conscience. Amazingly proficient at anything physical, able to plan out sophisticated strategies, they are entirely incapable of moral reasoning. This is useful for creating a monster the yields thrilling suspense sequences, as when the protagonists hide in the monsters' lair, and chase sequences, as when the protagonists flee through the woods. But one wonders what else it's useful for. That is to say, what is accomplished on a social and psychological level by depicting hillbillies in this fashion?

The victims of hillbillies, from a genuine classic like Deliverance (1972) through cult classics like Just Before Dawn (1981) and Rituals (1977) on to Wrong Turn, are always middle- or upper-class and educated. In Rituals, they're all doctors. In Deliverance they're successful businessmen. In Wrong Turn one character is a doctor and the others all seem well-to-do. The hillbillies are, of course, living in poverty and without education. Were I to hazard a guess, I'd suggest that we, the predominantly middle-class and educated audience, are being confronted with two monsters of our world: the enormous failure our economical and educational systems to distribute goods justly over all; the possibility that education and success has made us weak and unable to fend for ourselves in situations of real danger. Hence the logic-defying physical capabilities of the hillbillies in Wrong Turn and trapping skills of the hillbillies in Rituals. When the hillbillies are finally beaten down by our cityfolk protagonists, we can return to the world at ease with our social and economic systems: the monster has been repressed again. If the extremity of the backwoods horror tropes in Wrong Turn are any indication, the repression has only exacerbated the situation. The hillbillies are Wrong Turn are more hideous, more heinous, more horrendous than in nearly any of its predecessors.

But I'm not here to preach social justice. Wrong Turn, for all its decadence, delivers on terror, even if it does show its hand a little too early and is, behind the gloss, a generic backwoods horror. Still, it would take a very uncooperative viewer not to cheer the film's final punchline, at least in his heart. If the universe has been following those unbending laws, maybe there is no such thing as a 'wrong turn.' This is how inbred hillbillies ought to be repressed.