October Horror Challenge 2022 #18: "Wrong Turn 2: Dead End"

I saw the original Wrong Turn back when it came out. It was a special showing on a Wednesday night and I skipped church that night to watch mutant cannibals chowing down on the movie's characters. It was a good time and I liked the movie enough to buy it when it came out on DVD months later. I always meant to watch the sequels too, but first part 2 came out, then part 3 and part 4, and before I knew it there were six sequels and I was hopelessly behind. Now there's even a remake of the original movie out there and I haven't seen any of them. The best place to start is at the beginning, though, so I'm starting today watching part 2 finally, and we'll go from there.

So in this sequel, producers are shooting a survivalist reality show out in the boonies in Virginia where six contestants try to compete to be the final survivor for a $100,000 prize. Unfortunately, the location they chose happens to be home to a family of mutant cannibals who don't take kindly to having trespassers on their land. Soon the contestants find themselves in a true fight for survival. Who will survive and what will be left of them?

My comparison of this movie to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is intentional. All these movies owe their existence to TCM, the original mutant cannibal family movie. That one was the first and the best of the subgenre and the rest tend to pale in comparison to the original, but that doesn't mean they can't be gory fun in their own way.

I forgot that this movie stars Henry Rollins. He plays the drill-sargeant like host of the TV show, which is a role made for him. He can be cheesy and over-the-top, but in a movie like this that works pretty well with the spirit of the rest of the movie. The rest of the contestants kind of blend together and none of them stand out really well, which makes it hard to root for them, but it's a gory good time watching them get picked off one by one by the cannibals. Overall, this movie is cheesy and bloody and it manages to be fun in spite of its flaws. I'm glad I finally checked it out.