A group of twenty-somethings get stranded and find an isolated house in the middle of nowhere, a scrawny girl in a skimpy shirt manages to escape the confines of cannibals only to find herself back at the killers’ evil lair . . . oh, and there’s even a useless gas station in the mix as well. Sound familiar? It should because Wrong Turn was made almost three decades before. It’s called The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
What are we talking about? Rob Schmidt’s aptly titled, futile reimaging of Tobe Hooper’s classic, now devoid of any and all substance, which–when Schmidt’s smut does deviate from its predecessor–it does so . . . well, as I said, the title is quite fitting.
For example, the setting is moved from Texas to West Virginia, à la John Boorman’s Deliverance; in traditional Hollywood fashion, a young stallion is inserted into the cast just to–natch–save the day; and we have, yet again, more Hollywood feces in the form of a gratuitous explosion, which–natch II–eradicates the antagonists, formerly a collection of indigenous malforms, à la Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes. And to shove the whole damn salt lick into the gapping, festering, infected celluloid wound, the film was independently made . . .
Hold it, it gets worse. We are even given a trite checklist of “eerie things” after we enter the killers’ isolated cabin as the camera pans from room-to-room: mason jars replete with body parts, old dolls, grime and general dilapidation, and rusty tools. When our “heroes” find a radio and attempt to raise someone for a tentative rescue, they get nothing. Just as all hope of salvation is lost as the villains close in as they search for our desperately silent protagonists, who are afraid to even breathe for fear of revealing their location, the radio–natch III–crackles, thus foiling the good guys’ cover.
Rob Schmidt’s Wrong Turn was released six months before Marcus Nispel’s remake of Hooper’s masterpiece and a month-and-a-half after Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses, thus signaling a) the viewers’ gullibility in relation to watching and rewatching (and rewatching) an inferior rendition of something that they’d already seen and b) the filmmaker’s willingness to deface his own creation solely to make a buck, i.e. Though independently made, Schmidt’s film parrots Hollywood plot devices in spite of the autonomy of the source material (how trite, tasteless, inarticulate, and pampas is it to introduce a character, deus ex machina style nonetheless, and a male on top of that?) and the pride which the genre boasts in not succumbing to such rote, stereotypical tactics. But wait, could we really expect anything less from the screenwriter, Alan McElroy, who wrote the script for Vic Sarin’s Left Behind? I smell a whorish quill on the loose . . . . Bottom line, the only thing that Wrong Turn is good for is that it unequivocally proves that there is a vast difference between homage and uninspired plagiarism. And on that note, I believe that if I had watched Hooper’s film for each and every time I was pulled in or made to view a stagnant effigy, I think I’d be Hooper by now.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
