Wrong Movie

The stragglers from my last online DVD order keep coming in. One of these was Wrong Turn, a recent horror flick (made last year). It's basically a chop-fest in the tradition of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hills Have Eyes. Long on blood and short on everything else (including running time, it was only 84 minutes), it had some very memorable deaths. Five minutes into the film, you pretty much knew who was going to die. How those people died was exciting (one girl's death in particular was amazing, funny, and absolutely disgusting at the same time - I wanted to rewind the DVD, but Liz said "if I ever have to watch that again, I'm going to throw up" so I didn't). So props for some creative death scenes.

Also, props to them for not turning this into a post-Scream PG-13 horror movie. Most of the horror films these days have been trimmed and cut to an audience-friendly PG-13, which translates to more money for the studios, because they can market them to their largest demographic - those teenyboppers with the annoying pagers and the ringing cellphones who don't know how to shut the fuck up in a movie theater. This actually stemmed from the Christian Right forcing movie studios to make films that are more "family-friendly." At first, these studios told the Christian Right to take a long walk off a short pier (which is not an unexpected reaction when dealing with the Christian Right). But then, just to make them happy, the movie studios started tinkering with films, cutting them to achieve a PG-13 rating. And the studios discovered that these films made a hell of a lot more money, because their target demographic could flock to them every Friday and Saturday night, dropping obscene amounts of money at a theater. Thus, they began forcing many more movies to be cut down to the more marketable PG-13.

But not, I'm happy to say, Wrong Turn. They kept it true to its psycho-inbred-killing-redneck-cannibals-in-the-woods roots, and for that I'm grateful. It wasn't a great movie by any means, or a particularly great horror movie, but when the cannibals are dismembering the first corpse in the first fifteen minutes of the film, you know it's not going to spare anything. And it didn't.