In short: Wrong Turn (2021)

Warning: I do have to venture into spoiler territory here!

Remakes like this one by Mike P. Nelson of the 2003 backwoods horror movie are a weird proposition. There’s really no reason apart from some sort of legal rights thing to pretend the film at hand has much to do with the movie it is supposedly based one. Sure, it begins as a backwoods slasher about a band of young people getting into trouble with the locals, but so do a hundred movies not called Wrong Turn. In fact, one might think that giving an original movie its own title could interest the audience it was actually made for more than the proposition of a remake of a deeply mediocre film from the early 00s.

Be that as it may, at first, the film does some rather clever and interesting things, twisting the nastier classist aspects of the backwoods horror genre around, mixing things up with more contemporary ideas from the box of “wokeness”, while also suggesting that being perfectly up to standards in modern ideas about race or sexuality doesn’t mean you’re free of prejudice; all the while not falling into the trap of pretending everybody espousing these ideas is a hypocrite. Backwoods horror, with its inbuilt concept of city folk with bad survival instincts encountering inbred cannibal hicks is obviously a great sub-genre to subvert here.

And indeed, one of the film’s better ideas is to sort of fake-out its antagonists as the sort of rapist, racist, nasty monsters you’d expect, eventually revealing their somewhat more complicated history and nature. Of course, that’s also where the film’s problems on its message and theme level start, for while these backwoods people are not the exact same clichés every viewer will have expected, they are still the kind of barbarians that will murder or drag you into slavery or mutilate you for the tiniest reason, and have very dubious ideas about sexual consent. So they are functionally not all that different from the original concept, they only dress weirder. To make any of this work at all, the film also needs an audience willing to suspend disbelief rather deeply when it comes to questions as to how this society could have survived for as long as it has when it always treats trespassers the way they do, or how nobody ever called the feds on them.

These problems get bigger the longer the film goes on, and drag the third act down completely, needing the audience to believe a lot of complete nonsense so it can get to some kind of action-packed finale.

Not at all improving the lasting impression Wrong Turn 21 makes is the decision to drag the classic horror movie bullshit ending out to fifteen minutes or so, including a double fake-out, and needing the audience to simply accept so much that is completely contrary to what it has shown about the antagonists before, I found myself genuinely offended by it. This ending is really one of the most preposterously stupid things I’ve seen in quite some time, and provided the films I watch, that’s saying something.