WRONG TURN

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

What, again? Incredibly, having wrung every last dollar out of a franchise which ended after the sixth entry was withdrawn over lawsuits and therefore quite clearly wasn't worth milking any further, the Wrong Turn concept has moved to another studio and started again. In brief, the six Wrong Turns were agreeably nasty, agreeably nasty and funny, meh, actually not too bad, very poor and spectacularly sleazy. Now there's a new one and it's very much more of the same: a few surprises, some graphic grue, but there's also an attempt (by the original's writer) to give some depth to the backwoods psychos while ladling out the nastiness at the same time.

Otherwise, it is the usual crew of idiotic hunks and spunky nubiles getting lost in the woods while hiking the Appalachian Trail: despite all the warnings the kids merrily wander off the trail and end up triggering booby traps and being dragged off by masked psychos. This time, rather than a mere trio of homicidal freaks, there's a whole community called The Federation, who've been living by their own rules and laws since 1859, and from whom the  local townsfolk maintain a discreet distance. But the teens have broken the Federation's laws and are sentenced to death, or worse... Meanwhile, the father of one of the girls (Matthew Modine) is driving out to the rescue but getting dissuaded at every turn...

Wrong Turn 2020 is actually the best since Joe Lynch's 2007 Wrong Turn 2: Dead End. It pulls a few interesting twists, such as the most achingly liberal of the group realising that the Federation exactly represents the rural socialist community project of his urban dreams, and it does a neat reversal with the most notable of the town rednecks. Against that, it is too long (a woodland slasher really doesn't need to be 110 minutes) and at least one of the heroes is a thundering bellend of the highest order so it's hard to feel too bad when he's brutally offed. In the end, it's not bad at all: perfectly alright for a Friday night rental though it would benefit from a substantial edit. Whether this incarnation will last for six movies or not, we'll just have to see.

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