Wrong Turn Review (2021) Worth Watching?

It's about a group of friends who venture off-trail while hiking in the middle of nowhere Virginia... and regret it hard.

Wrong Turn was directed by Mike P. Nelson (who also directed The Domestics) and stars Charlotte Vega (from The Lodgers and Another Me), Matthew Modine (from 47 Meters Down) and Bill Sage ( from The Pale Door, Fender Bender and The Blackout).

This land is their land

I love the Wrong Turn franchise. I've watched through the entire series twice and reviewed every Wrong Turn movie here at All Horror. I know the backstory, each story, all characters and every twist inside and out.

The Wrong Turn franchise introduced us to some of the coolest killer cannibalistic hillbillies in horror.

And this new Wrong Turn took them all away.

This reboot of Wrong Turn is a lot like the reboot of Child's Play from a couple of years ago in that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the original. It's a 100% standalone movie that only has the name in common with the original franchise. They could have called it Lost in the Woods or something and it wouldn't have changed anything.

Gone are the crazy cannibals with messed up faces. This Wrong Turn gives us perfectly normal people who just like to live off the grid. And not one of them is Three Finger!! They're just regular people tryna live their life. This is the reason this Wrong Turn didn't land well with horror fans. It's only natural to compare a reboot to its original and totally understandable to get upset when it pulls the 'ol bait-n-switch and gives you some random new story.

So, with all that being said, I really liked this new Wrong Turn!

Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort, the previous Wrong Turn from 2014, had little semblance to the rest of the franchise. It got weird and became a movie about teens and cults. So I wasn't actually expecting this new Wrong Turn to have any semblance either. They already turned the corner back then and there's already been a precedent set for reboots to just lease a franchise name to slap on their own unrelated movies. I think this expectation really helped me to see the movie for what it was, another movie about teens and cults (seriously, we're talking robes and everything).

This Wrong Turn is about a group of friends who go hiking deep in the Appalachians and find a culty commune of Old South holdouts. One of the holdouts gets killed and the friends go on trial for the crime. The commune's court is in a cave, there's torches, everyone's in robes. It's weird. The friends get "convicted" of the crime, face a super harsh penalty and try to escape. This is basically where the movie starts.

Overall I thought the entertainment value of this movie was high. There's a lot of action, a good amount of gore, some cool practical effects and even a couple of unexpected twists. The cinematography was on point too, I actually interviewed cinematographer Nick Junkersfeld shortly before the film released. Every movie has its shortcomings and this Wrong Turn was no exception, but I didn't think it hurt the experience in any way.

Will I watch it twice?

Honestly, probably not. I really like Wrong Turn but this Wrong Turn was no Wrong Turn, even though it's called Wrong Turn.