Wrong Turn is Proof that Absolutely Anyone Can Make a Wide-Released Hollywood Film

I know that we have a large audience here on Unreality, and you guys come from all backgrounds in a ton of different locations. Therefore, I’m willing to bet that a few of you are aspiring filmmakers, or at the very least, wish you could make movies. I am here to tell you that your dream can come true, and if you don’t believe me, I implore you to watch Wrong Turn.

The film you might have heard of, but I’m betting most of you haven’t seen it. Released in 2003, it stars Desmond Harrington (Quinn from Dexter). Eliza Dushku and Emmanuelle Chirqui (Sloan from Entourage). It tells the sordid tale of a group of hot young people who are trapped and assaulted by inbred hill people.

Wrong Turn was in theaters for 119 days, grossing $28M on a $12M budget after release in 1,615 theaters nationwide.

This is a success story, and tale of massive failure all at once. The reason I’m bringing up this movie is not as an example of how a small budget can yield big results, rather, it’s that if a movie with an idea this unoriginal and a script this terrible can get greenlighted and made, whatever crazy idea you have cooking in your head has the possibility to come to life as well some day. Wrong Turn is a lesson that even the laziest of ideas can become a feature film, so there’s hope for whatever film you want to make as well.

You think fire can stop me? I’m not Frankenstein bitches.

I originally watched this movie because I’m a horror fan, and the idea of Eliza Duskhu running around in a tank top didn’t sound like the worst thing in the world. Add in Entrouage’s Emmanuelle Chriqui and you’ve got yourself a deal. I turned it on not expecting much, and boy, that’s what I got.

I have never seen a more straightforward plot executed so blandly. A man (Desmond Harrington) late for something gets into a car accident with a vehicle disabled on the road, out pops a group of four good looking young folk (Dusku and Chirqui included) who say that they ran over some barbed wire. With no cell phone service way in the middle of the woods (surprise!), they’re forced to wander aimlessly around until they find help, but little do they know, they’re being stalked from afar.

The bad guys in this movie are some deformed inbred orc-looking creatures that appear to be pulled out of an X-Files episode, and they help the film fulfill every horror cliché ever made.

Early on, people are murdered when doing something promiscuous. Later, the sensitive guy (literally wearing a flower around his neck at one point) is murdered doing something surprisingly noble. The prissy girl is offed as well, and soon all who are left are the strong male and female leads, injured, but able to fight back against their oppressors. Insert tricks about someone being surprised, but finding out it’s their really friend, a cop showing up and then dying, and the monster suddenly getting up again after it clearly should be dead. I could list about ten more off the top of my head, but you get the idea.

Seriously man? Be more of a stereotype.

It’s literally one of the most generic movies I’ve ever seen. It’s the equivalent of the rom-com where a guy and a girl hate each other, but slowly fall in love. These clichés are fine if you’re MOCKING them, but Wrong Turn clearly is not, and tackles each one with a deadly straight face, and they make up the entirety of the film.

There is no script to this movie. I had to go and rewatch parts immediately after finishing it to be able to remember one thing that was said. The entire duration of the movie, the dialogue consists of “we should go that way, “you should wait here” or “oh no, they are coming to kill us.” It’s like a parody of bad horror movies who never bother to humanize their cast. You end up rooting for the monsters to end up killing all these people just because they’re so damn boring.

I just don’t see how a movie like this ever got made. I know the same could said for countless other titles, but this one bothers me in particular. At least spectacularly awful movies like Rollerball, Waterworld or Battlefield Earth were actually TRYING something, even if they failed miserably. But Wrong Turn just lays there like a dead fish, and inspiring people like me to grab the nearest iPhone 4 and go shoot a better movie myself.

Wrong Turn is a symbol of the low bar set by the film industry in this modern age. Original ideas are in short supply, and when they’re not resort to cliché, they’re adapting board games and children’s toys into feature film ideas.

If you’re creative, and you have an ounce of talent and determination, with the current state of things in the industry, I’m almost positive you could make an impact if you tried. And if you do? Tell ’em I sent you.

And not even any toplessness to boot… Probably one of their better career decisions.

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17 Comments

  1. if you think this movie is awful i challenge you to watch “crossover”. that is probably one of the worst movies ever, the dialogue is incredible…y bad.

  2. I’m just going to go out and say it. I love Wrong Turn. It’s got mountains, armed orc people, and Emmanuelle Chriqui in her prime. It’s one of my favorite bad movies.

  3. You think watching the movie is bad? I live in W.V., where the movie is set, and I work with middle school students. I have now lost count of the times I’ve had to explain that this is not based on a true story and no, your cousin’s boyfriend’s brother’s best friend did not grow up two miles from where the movie takes place. I couldn’t just watch the movie and move on; I have to deal with reminders of its lameness on at least a monthly basis.

  4. While I think Wrong Turn was a pretty dumb movie, I do find it odd that you’re choosing to skewer it now. It’s hardly the best example of sloppy filmmaking in the modern age, since it’s almost a decade old. As you said at the top of the article, most people probably haven’t seen it, which makes me wonder why you feel the need to warn them. If they haven’t seen it by now, they probably won’t ever bother with it.

    All of that aside, you make many awesome points. The dialogue is so bad and the characters are so flat that you just don’t care about any of it. Keep up the good work!

  5. I think there are lot of dumber movies than this for discussion , if you talking that theme . Wrong Turn for me is 6.5/10 movie , there are much worse movies , and its not easy to make a movie , its difficult to set the picture that you have in your head .

  6. you can’t blame the people making the movies…. you must take on 90% of society. if people didn’t pay to watch these movies, they wouldn’t be made.

    i applaud anyone who makes a quick buck with little effort just by playing off the stupidity of society.

  7. Only saw this once and the most memorable thing for me is how it showed just how clueless my mother is. She thought it was gonna be a comedy. She knew nothing of the movie other than the title.

  8. I agree with Gill, why attack a movie that is 7 years old? Wrong Turn is a slasher movie and nothing more…what exactly did you expect when you played it? Its a 6/10 and at the time was basically trying to be a new Hills Have Eyes before there was the reboot.

  9. What an odd choice for the prime example of cinema sloppiness. This movie was made as an homage to the likes of The (Original) Hills Have Eyes, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I’d say it was far more original than the remakes and pointless sequels of those respective films that ended up coming out in the years to follow this movie. Those films are the epitome of unoriginality and they all received wide theatrical releases. The Hills Have Eyes simply threw one disturbing act of violence after another at you until it ended. Seriously go and watch that movie and tell me it’s not just sequences of brutal murder, torture, and rape and baby-stealing. Plain awful, and then they made a sequel. Then you have the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake which, I’ll be honest, managed to be somewhat tense and suspenseful, but then they rocked out a sequel which was essentially the same exact movie, except the bad guys win at the end because it was a prequel. Wrong Turn actually accomplishes what it set out to do. It wasn’t trying to be bigger than what it was. It’s a homage to the classics made on a small budget returning a higher profit, one hell of a cast because these actors were still trying to find their niche, and it’s straightforward and doesn’t bog itself down with pointless dialogue or backstory for some asshole were all hoping gets off because we all want Eliza Dushku to ourselves.

    I’ll leave you with one final thought. An example of a bigger crapfest with a bigger budget, bigger actors, and a HUGE marketing campaign, with a wide relase that yielded no real profit, and maybe you can write an article on this: THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. *yuck*

  10. @Jackson

    I’m really sick of shittiness explained away as being an “homage” to something, which seems to happen far too often. It just means you’ve stolen the major plot points from another work in the genre (in this case, borrowing the practically the entire film from The Hills Have Eyes), loosely crafted a script around it and passed it off as an original work, which is exactly what happened here.

  11. You could have picked a much better movie as an example. This movie wasn’t trying to be anything more than what it is. It’s a light-hearted, straight-forward horror movie with an exceptionally solid cast (for the type of film that it is), a direct forward-moving story without any pointless scenes bogging it down, make-up effects by one of the best natural make-up artists of our time, and some very gruesome and clever kills (the person chopped through the face with an ax, the rest of their body falling while the top of their head rests on the ax). And if it’s not an homage, and you’re tired of the word (which isn’t really a counter-point), the movie at least stays faithful to it’s genre. And let’s be honest, there’s not much else you can do with that type of movie.

    The point I was trying to make was there are far better examples of cinematic schlock out there, or blatant cash-ins. This was not really one of them, when considering what else is out there.

    “Battlestar Galactica and Stargate are nothing more than pointless rip-offs of Star Trek. We’ve all seen it before. Humans fly around on spaceships and canoodle with aliens. They have to save something or the universe is in danger the end. Rounding out that category is Star Wars, the biggest rip-off of Star Trek ever. And yet people are too blinded by George Lucas and has cash-grabbing ways to truly admit those films are nothing special, nothing more special than REALLY strong (and loooooooong) marketing campaigns.”

    My point is it’s real easy to go on a shirt-sighted, opinionated rant. It doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is going to be on board. People have different interests, and some people can see the value in things other people can’t. So just because it doesn’t mean anything to you, doesn’t mean that holds the same for everyone. Evidence: The fact that David Hasslehoff has a career.

  12. Once again I am floored by the level of unrealistic idealism you guys display in your reviews. You really have no concept of what bad film making is. Your line about grabbing your iPhone and making your own movie is exactly what leads to 99% of the shitty films out there, and this actually wasn’t one of them. Sure, Wrong Turn didn’t blow up the art house circuit, it didn’t win any prestigious awards, it wasn’t some cerebral movie that required a deep understanding of philosophy to follow. Instead, it was a well constructed, thoughtfully directed gore movie with some phenomenal effects and some decent scares. Seriously. What were you expecting going into a movie like this? How fucking high are your standards that you can’t even turn off your brain for 90 minutes to enjoy a well executed, fun movie? Want to see a REAL review for this flick? Go check out Movie Cynics. The Vocabularist nailed it in his review.

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