STARRING CHARLOTTE VEGA, MATTHEW MODINE AND BILL SAGE.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
Wow. I love all these ‘WRONG TURN’ movies to bits. This one is what’s known as a franchise re-boot, I think, and it was hugely entertaining. I don’t think I was bored at all during the one hour and fifty minutes it was on.
It’s sort of a ‘WRONG TURN’ for the digital age, which I thought might put me off, but strangely enough it didn’t. It’s ‘MIDSOMMAR’ meets ‘THE HILLS HAVE EYES,’ combining a weird cult with the usual inbred and terrifying mountainy folk we’ve come to expect from this kind of film.
Matthew Modine plays Scott Shaw, a concerned dad trying to find his daughter Jen, who seemingly went missing recently while hiking with some college friends along the Appalachian Trail.
According to Wikipedia, this trail is a marked hiking route about 2,200 miles long which extends from Georgia to Maine in the Eastern United States, and is said to be used by about two million tourists a year. Popular trail.
The viewers quickly find out what happened to Jen and her five mates. First, they wind up in the kind of old ‘Confederate’ town in Virginia where some of the older folks still retain the mores and morals, customs and mind-sets of a much earlier time. This often means that the community is rife with racism, sexism and homophobia.
The little group of six college students rouse a lot of suspicion and contempt in the town. Jen, the lead girl and a student of the arts who is unsure of what to do with her life, is an all-American white girl who is dating Darius, a black guy.
That’s frowned upon by the townspeople, as is the gay relationship and ethnicities of Gary and Luis. Gary is an Indian chap (not a native American Indian) and Luis is of Hispanic origin.
Milla and Adam, a trainee doctor and app developer respectively, are just an ordinary white American couple. Clearly, the film-makers couldn’t think of a way to make them into some kind of a minority, lol.
Anyway, the six students head off happy as Larry on the self-guided trail, but tragedy strikes when the group take a ‘wrong turn’ in search of an old civil war fort and one of their number is horribly killed.
The remaining five students decide that they need to get back to civilisation and safety straightaway, but the unseen presence on the mountain that’s been dogging their footsteps since they arrived in town has other ideas. Nasty, painful, dangerous and horrible ideas…
I love the idea of the mountainy cult known as ‘the Foundation’ that actually pre-dates the Civil War. You’d expect them to be as racist as the townspeople, so it’s a pleasant surprise, if a tad confusing, when it turns out they’re not. They’re no saints, though, and what they have, they hold. Remember that…
They have such evil reputations for murdering and torturing outsiders that even the townspeople are scared to death of them and won’t go near their hunting grounds, which are lethally equipped with booby-traps.
The sheriff and the townsfolk prefer to act like the strange, spooky mountainy folks just don’t exist, which is why they- mostly- elect not to help Jen’s distraught dad Scott when he comes looking for his missing daughter.
I don’t mind the bear costumes, but I’m not sure why the culties have to talk in weird Scandinavian-type accents, though. I loved the cult leader, Venable, whom I nicknamed ‘Poppa Bear,’ not just because of the bear costume, but also because he’s exactly the type of burly, beardy middle-aged bloke I go for now. I would have volunteered for ‘wifey duties’ in a heartbeat, and you wouldn’t have needed to force me either, lol, but that’s just me.
The violence in the film is pretty shocking. It seems to be the fashion since ‘MIDSOMMAR,’ a sort of modern day re-imagining of THE WICKER MAN, to portray in horror movies of this nature the complete obliteration of the human head and face, and this film has that kind of thing in spades. It also has the horror movie trope of the ‘lost and found’ shed, filled with the backpacks and dead cell-phones of legions of murdered tourists.
I liked that we find out what happened to Jen in her life ‘post-Foundation,’ but I can’t help feeling that she’s going to have a lot of explaining to do to the authorities after that ending. Still, that’s not our problem, I guess.
I’d love to see more films in the re-booting of this excellent franchise, although it’d be a challenge to come up with a better premise than this one. If the film-makers do run out of ideas, I for one would be happy enough to go back to basics with the cannibalistic hillbillies from the backwoods. Now there’s an idea that just never gets old.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
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