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Chris Finn takes a short cut in the back roads of West Virginia to avoid a chemical spill on the highway.  Out in the middle of nowhere he collides with another vehicle sitting in the centre of the dirt road.  The other vehicle was stopped in its tracks by a mess of barb wire left in the road.  The wire was not there accidentally.  Chris and the group from the other vehicle have stumbled into the hunting grounds of a trio of grossly deformed inbred Appalachian mountain men.  Can they survive the continued assaults of these barely human monsters?

Wrong Turn is another one of those breath of fresh air horror movies.  In some ways, plot-wise at the least, this is the film that Texas Chain Saw Massacre (the original) could have been but managed not to be.  This film is the stuff of nightmares, real doozies.  The plot is well paced, the scares strung out through the film well.  The acting was pretty good overall, some of the lesser characters were a touch too cliche in their portrayals.  The way the film unrolls the story does turn from strong horror to a more action/adventure orientation even though it maintains the horrific touches.

The special effects by Stan Winston were amazing as always, most of them interweaved into the film so as to be transparent, but at the same time memorable.  The musical score was excellent and never overused or underused.  The exterior locations were nice, well fit to the story, but not as spectacular as they could have been.  The interior sets were well crafted with a good eye for detail, but they were still a touch too clean and orderly.  All in all Wrong Turn is just shy of being a new horror classic.

DVD NOTES: Wrong Turn has Chapter Selection, a Commentary Track, four "Making of" Featurettes, a Poster Gallery, and Deleted Scenes as its special features.  The video quality on this disc is excellent, crystal clear throughout, with solid darks.  The audio is good with fair but limited use of directionality across the different sound stages.  The featurettes were short and kind of fluffy, not the kind of thing to watch frequently.  One though was a fair look at what an actor has to do in a film such as this (or any film with special effects).  The deleted scenes were more like extended scenes than ones really missing from the film.  As far as DVDs go Wrong Turn is an average disc, or what an average disc should be.

( Thank you for reading my review.
Bob Male)

All ideas, opinions, and information are from the reviewer and are not representative of any company or group involved with the creators and/or staff of the materials being reviewed.