There’s a moment in the final act of Mike P. Nelson‘s just-released Wrong Turn reboot, which comes nearly two full hours after experiencing a Wrong Turn movie quite unlike any Wrong Turn movie you’ve seen before, where two characters are talking about a “movie night” taking place that evening. The movie chosen for the night, one of the characters notes, is “something with inbred cannibals.” “Again? Geez,” the other character replies. It’s a winking nod to the previous Wrong Turn films from this movie’s writer Alan B. McElroy, who’s allowed to poke fun because he’s the guy who wrote the original movie that launched the franchise. But beyond being a cute in-joke, it’s also reflective of the entire modus operandi of this bold reboot.
Wrong Turn is essentially a Wrong Turn remake in-name-only, stripping down the franchise to its bare basics and daring to tell an entirely new (and far more ambitious) story within the loose general framework of a group of good-looking characters being terrorized in the woods… after taking, you guessed it, a wrong turn. Technically, Nelson’s Wrong Turn is the seventh installment in the largely direct-to-video franchise that’s been a case of severely diminishing returns in the wake of Joe Lynch’s standout highlight Wrong Turn 2, but it’s precisely because Wrong Turn ’21 doesn’t act like it’s the seventh installment in a long-running, low-bar franchise that it’s able to emerge as such a shining example of what can be done within a franchise framework if the past is left entirely, well, in the past.
In recent years we’ve seen a handful of horror franchise “reboots” that aim to unshackle themselves from the past, of course to varying degrees. Most notably, David Gordon Green’s Halloween back in 2018 completely removed all kinds of sequels and even a remake and its own sequel from the equation, instead serving as a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s original classic. Mind you, it was far from the first retcon reinvention for the franchise, with Halloween III: Season of the Witch coming along decades prior and existing in a world wherein Carpenter’s Halloween was nothing more than a movie you could find playing on television at the local bar. Halloween III, to a much larger degree than Gordon Green’s Halloween, attempted to reinvent its namesake franchise completely, to such an extent that many believe the movie would have been far better received upon release if it bore no connection to the franchise whatsoever. And that’s probably true, as Halloween III has gone on to become a fan favorite sequel that’s now hailed as a true risk-taking gem in the realm of franchise horror.
The same may end up being the fate of Nelson’s Wrong Turn reboot, a movie that similarly removes the iconic (I use that term loosely here) villains from the franchise and replaces them with an entirely different force of evil. There are no mutant inbred cannibals in this year’s take on the Wrong Turn franchise, and it’s likely that characters like Three-Finger exist in its world only on televisions you may find at the local watering hole; it’s safe to assume, as evidence of this theory, that the “inbred cannibal movies” the characters are referring to in the scene mentioned above are indeed the six previous Wrong Turn movies. The villains here are instead The Foundation, a group of characters living in the Appalachian Mountains who like to roam around the woods in animal pelts and creepy skull masks. They’re sure not the kind of people you want to meet out in the woods, but what they’re also not is mutant cannibals.
Like Halloween III and even the Jason Voorhees-less Friday the 13th: A New Beginning before it, it’s likely that Wrong Turn purists (of which there are many, one can only assume, to justify the franchise continuing to this point) will take issue with the fact that Nelson’s Wrong Turn isn’t an inbred cannibal mutant movie, and I suppose it’s a fair criticism to raise. After all, how much does a franchise movie need to adhere to the nuts and bolts of the franchise before it’s hardly even part of the franchise anymore at all? For some, without question, McElroy’s return to the Wrong Turn franchise he created will be frowned upon on the basis of its dismissal of the previous movies, and that’s understandable. Others, however, will view this particular turn for the franchise not as a “wrong” one but rather see it for what it really is: an attempt to elevate a franchise from what it previously was, into what it can be.
McElroy and Nelson’s Wrong Turn is indeed nothing if not outside-the-box, a nearly two-hour saga that tracks the journey of a woman, Charlotte Vega‘s Jen, who first endures something akin to a typical Wrong Turn movie before being catapulted into a ruthless nightmare that’s quite unlike anything we’ve come to expect from the franchise she’s found herself the latest heroine of. I’m intentionally keeping the spoiler details light here so as not to ruin the movie for anyone who has yet to see it, but the basic gist is that the film is roughly structured into three distinct aspects that ultimately converge into one cohesive nightmare of a horror story.
We have the story of Jen and her friends, who are picked off in the woods by a largely unseen force that could very well be cannibal mutants until we find out they’re not, and then we have a subversion of expectations with Jen being exposed to the true horror of the situation she’s found herself in, forced to adapt to the situation in order to emerge as the “final girl” she seems destined to be. Then there’s a subplot involving Jen’s dad, played by Matthew Modine. Modine’s character is attempting to find his daughter after she went missing weeks prior, and it’s a subplot that most filmmakers (and most studios, if not the filmmakers themselves) probably would’ve cut from the movie entirely. But it’s a testament to the creative team’s ambition that it made the cut, ballooning the film’s runtime to just under two hours. It essentially allows the film to play out across multiple weeks, with McElroy’s script packing damn near a full television season’s worth of storytelling into one Wrong Turn movie. Perhaps more accurately, Wrong Turn 2021 plays out like a slasher movie and its sequel rolled into one, allowing its final girl to have a story that extends far beyond merely surviving her ordeal.
“Ambition” is hardly a term that could be applied to the previous Wrong Turn sequels, but Mike P. Nelson’s Wrong Turn is ambition personified in the realm of franchise horror. His contribution to the franchise isn’t merely a “young people vs. mutant cannibals” slasher, but rather a sweeping tale of generations-spanning societal division that a group of unsuspecting young characters happen to find themselves smack dab in the middle of. It’s a film that digs deep into its own mythology and the town that has allowed this particular brand of horror to go on for so long, bringing timely real-world issues to the table in the process. Mind you, it’s a bit hard to really discern what Wrong Turn is ultimately even saying at the end of the day (an argument could be made that its thesis is that the “left” and the “right” need to come together against violent extremism, and that text is certainly there), but the one thing that’s crystal clear by the time the end credits start rolling across the screen, a new spin on a classic American folk song playing out over top of one of the most satisfying and striking horror movie finales in recent years, is that the Wrong Turn franchise will never be the same again. With just one movie and one filmmaker who dared to do something different, it has become a wholly unrecognizable new beast entirely its own.
For Nelson’s Wrong Turn, the “Wrong Turn” branding is merely familiar packaging intended to draw your attention to something that’s far more original than the title would suggest. It’s a Wrong Turn movie without being a Wrong Turn movie, reminding that terms like “reboot” and “remake” are only synonymous with words like “unoriginal” if we choose to keep copy/pasting the same stories, formulas and tropes over and over again. And though it’s far from the first franchise follow-up with the ambition to break out of established confines, it’s nevertheless an exceedingly rare example of a late-late-late game franchise installment that impressively suffers from zero franchise fatigue. If you had told me that the seventh installment of any horror franchise, much less the Wrong Turn franchise, would end up being one of the best horror movies of its release year, I never would have believed you. But here that movie is, daring to dream beyond the low quality standards of the past. Daring to smash the glass ceiling that previously hung over the franchise. And surprising the hell out of a horror world expecting very little from a film nobody should’ve ever expected much from.
Whereas Halloween 2018 merely ignored previous sequels in order to get back to familiar comforts of the past, Wrong Turn 2021 ignores virtually everything about the franchise in order to blaze an unexpected new path entirely. And while it may not work for everyone – in her review for Bloody Disgusting, Meagan Navarro noted that she feels the film “loses itself in the woods,” and she makes some great points about the movie’s shortcomings – the movie at the very least should stand out as an example of what we can do with tired franchises if we only allow ourselves to move beyond what’s comfortable, familiar, and expected of them. There was a time when a Wrong Turn sequel needed only to be a bloody cannibal movie in the woods, delivering cheap thrills to just barely satisfy anyone who hadn’t yet given up on the series, but Nelson’s Wrong Turn suggests that maybe we don’t have to think that way. Maybe every movie should strive to be the best movie it can be, whether it’s attempting to launch a brand new franchise or it’s the fifteenth installment in a franchise that’s been running on fumes for decades. Maybe every franchise deserves a Mike P. Nelson to inject new life into it.
It’s a special kind of treat watching a movie you expect next to nothing from and being completely shocked by how much you find yourself enjoying it, and that’s precisely the experience I had watching Wrong Turn. It’s not the experience every viewer will have, of course, but even if it’s not for you it’s hard to deny that this seventh iteration of the Wrong Turn franchise is at the very least one that will never be lumped together with all the rest. It treats itself like its the first of its kind rather than the seventh of its kind, and watching it you may find yourself completely forgetting altogether that it’s the latter. And it makes you wonder, what can the next Friday the 13th look like, if it only dares to deliver something fresh? What unexpected directions can the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise go down, once Freddy Krueger is brought back to life on the big screen? Granted, both of those franchises are far more precious than Wrong Turn and probably need to adhere a bit more closely to their source material, but point being, even the longest-running franchises still have limitless potential for originality. They always will, no matter how many movies they’ve already pumped out, and we won’t know where they can go next until we start taking some more big swings.
Maybe it’s on us, the fans, to start allowing our favorite franchises to let the past die. But first we need to ask ourselves what we really want. Surely it’s not more of the same, is it?
