FrightFest '07: Wrong Turn 2

Pop quiz: name a movie where a small group of people heads out into the middle of nowhere... Got deja vu? It's not surprising: Wrong Turn 2 is another film where a group of idiots find themselves in the middle of the woods at the mercy of a load of murderous sub-humans.

Wrong Turn was pretty bad to begin with, so, given the clichéd premise and the fact that this is a sequel to a terrible movie, Wrong Turn 2 is shockingly enjoyable. Don't get me wrong, the script is pretty execrable, but between the efforts of director Joe Lynch, the able cast, and lots and lots of gore, it's a fairly fun ride, even though (or maybe because) it's completely braindead.

Actually, that last sentence could be summed up in about two words: HENRY ROLLINS. The man is awesome. In Wrong Turn 2, he plays a kickass military type who's hosting a brand new reality TV show, The Ultimate Survivalist: The Apocalypse. The show is set in a fake post-apocalyptic world where only a handful of people have survived; every day, they'll face various challenges, and every day one of them will be 'killed' until the ultimate survivor wins $100,000. Unfortunately, the game's taking place in the woods where the mutants from Wrong Turn live, so the game becomes real pretty darned quickly.

After about 20 minutes, actually. Unfortunately, as soon as the mutants show up, the reality TV show premise is abandoned and it becomes a very typical stalk-and-slash - only with lots and lots of gore. People get cut in half, blown up with dynamite, pushed through wood chippers, and shot full of arrows; it's a straight to DVD movie, so it can get away with being unrated and Lynch has taken full advantage of this.

It's really a pity that this immediately followed Storm Warning at FrightFest, because the two movies are very similar, and they're both in a genre which is (deservedly) dying on its ass. Wrong Turn 2 is the better movie of the two, because it's more gleeful, deliberately sillier, and without that undercurrent of meanness that's so common in this kind of movie nowadays; it's better than the original Wrong Turn for the same reasons, actually. Joe Lynch himself is a highly entertaining bundle of manic energy, and it's really that, rather than anything in the screenplay, that pulls this movie through.

Well, that, and Henry Rollins.

IMDB link