So apparently they made a remake of Wrong Turn when I was in jail so I never heard about it until I was searching around on Amazon Prime and I saw a Wrong Turn that came out in 2021. Learn something new every day. It seems kinda soon to be remaking "Wrong Turn," since the original only came out in 2003, which I guess is ancient to some people, but it was only 19 years ago. I still remember going to see it in theaters when it came out and skipping church to go to a special showing of it at our little theater in town. Of course I was otherwise occupied when this remake came out, and by then covid had closed down our little theater anyway, but nothing was stopping me from watching this movie this year, so I get a chance to see what I think about it.
In this version of Wrong Turn, despite warnings to stick to the Appalachian trail, a group of hikers strays off to check out some local scenery, and they cross over into land inhabited by a secretive group of mountain dwellers who use deadly violence to protect their way of life (this is why you always stick to the trail). When they are besieged by the local residents, they seem headed for the point of no return, unless a man who could be their savior can reach them in time.
Something I always appreciated about the original Wrong turn was that the characters were more likeable than the typical characters in a slasher movie like this. They seemed to be genuine friends who cared about each other, and this remake has retained that sense of friendship and camaraderie between the characters that makes me care about what happens more than I would in other movies of this ilk. Of course, that was only for the first 30 minutes or so of this movie, just enough time for everything to fall apart. See, instead of making this a story where a bunch of tourists stumble across a killing ground for a mutant cannibal family, this movie decides to turn the cannibals into a secret society with their own laws and language, and the movie turns into a huge pile of shit. It just keeps getting more and more ridiculous until even I can't believe how stupid the plot twists are. Then there's some okay gore, then the movie gets preachy on us, then it gets even preachier, then I almost fell asleep. maybe I should have let myself fall asleep. I could have dreamed a better ending than this. Look, I'm not telling you what to do, and if you're a horror fan you're probably going to see this movie eventually anyway, so you might want to just bite the bullet and get it over with now and watch this movie, but for my money, the original Wrong Turn or any of its 54435678 sequels is better than this movie, so I wish I'd watched one of those instead.
I will say this for the movie, though, it has an awesome ending. Just when I was ready to turn it off (because SERIOUSLY, the end credits were running and I don't get paid enough for this shit, but the movie was still going on over the end credits and with a spectacularly haunting version of the song "This Land is Your Land," so I kept watching, and they included some plot twists just made for me to love them, and I wonder why this movie waited until the end to throw this much good stuff at us and make me like it again. See, when that happens it's hard to dislike a movie, even a bad one, because it leaves me with a smile and that's mainly what I remember. Good show, ending of the movie. It's about time.
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