Wrong Turn was the first movie I watched that involve inbred cannibals. It took me a lot longer to watch the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so seeing this film on Netflix I wondered how they would reboot that classic and how they would make it good, spoilers – they didn’t.

Wrong Turn 2021 follows a group of young adults who go off on a camping trip and are warned not to deviate from the path due to there being people out there, and these people are almost like a woodland cult that have certain ways of doing their life.

The group don’t listen obviously and they have a run in with this group who they believe has killed one of their friends. Now, in the original film the whole point of the family was that they were killing these people. They were these horrible, scary monsters, however in this film the cult is actually trying to help people and it is the group that causes a death to one of their members. And I did have to wonder ‘why should I care?’.

I feel with 2000s horror there is a certain special element to it in that you expect it to be kind of trashy and cheap because that’s what they had available then. Horrors weren’t given huge budgets, the sorts of films they were, were very simple and silly but also dark and gory too. They almost had this quirk about them that made you love them because they were filmed in a certain time where low rise jeans and flip phones were all the rage, however this sort of film doesn’t work in the 2020s.

Nowadays we expect bigger productions, bigger films, more exciting and scary characters and with this I just didn’t get that. Everything was very 2000s, all the tropes were very of that time and they just did not fit with this narrative. I didn’t care about the cult or the people living in the forest and what they were doing. I didn’t care about the main characters because they all seemed like terrible people, and while that was charming in the 2000s and you enjoyed seeing them slowly be picked off one by one, in this movie, I won’t lie I didn’t finish it because I just did not care.

Wrong Turn is a fantastic bunch of films that really should stay in the 2000s. I get why they would want to remake it because it was popular and you can easily bring a new audience to that sort of film, but for me it just didn’t have that same magic about it and that’s a real shame, because I don’t want people watching this film first and then not watching the classics because they think it’s like this one. It’s not, it’s so much better.

I wouldn’t recommend this film at all, even if you enjoyed Wrong Turn the original like I did. It’s a terrible story with boring characters, gore that has been seen in the likes of Midsommer that just seems a bit overdone now – is head squishing the new big thing in horror? This film did not excite me, I did not care about it, and I would not watch it again.

What do you think of Wrong Turn 2021?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding