Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007)

Submitted by corwin on Mon, 12 Nov 2007 1:34am

Dustin, Jess, and I decided to give Wrong Turn 2: Dead End a try based on the recommendation of Film Threat's Chris Gore. In the DVDuesday segment on Attack of the Show, he gave it a buy, calling it a slasher flick in the style of the classics of the genre. That combined with the appearance of Henry Rollins in the cast was enough for us, so I popped it in the Netflix queue despite having never seen the original Wrong Turn. Dustin and Jess assured me the original had no redeeming value and was definitely not something I needed to waste my time on. Sadly, completist that I am, I will have to rent it someday. At any rate, none of us is sure what Chris Gore was thinking with that recommendation. It wasn't, by far, the worst movie I've seen in this genre, to be sure. It was fun to watch with friends, but not something I would have chosen to see, save for the presence of Henry Rollins. Now, let's spoil this bad boy.

The plot is pretty basic, as can be expected. A group of pretty, young people are gathered together in the woods for a new reality show called The Ultimate Survivalist: The Apocalypse. Henry Rollins plays the host, a retired Marine Corps colonel. A group of ultimately forgettable young actors fill out the cast and crew of the reality show. IMDB says they all have names, but they're really not worth dwelling upon. Turns out they've set up their reality show in a part of the West Virginia woods inhabited by cannibalistic inbred mutant hillbillies, who systematically kill them all, except for Final Girl and Final Guy. Henry Rollins's character is clearly the star of this movie. One of the things I like about Rollins is how he completely throws himself into his role. Like Michael Caine, Lance Henriksen, or Bruce Campbell, he gives everything he has to the movie, no matter how godawful it is. From very early on, we were rooting for him to survive, even though we knew in our hearts that wasn't going to happen. He turned out to be one of the best characters I've seen in this kind of movie. He didn't do anything terribly stupid (unlike everyone else in the film) and he was tough enough to take a tremendous amount of punishment without giving in. Captured by the hillbillies, he managed to escape and took out most of the rest of them on his own. In a nod to ludicrous action movies, he came across a bow and a box of dynamite, and it was obvious he was going to combine them to good use. Sure enough, his exploding arrows were made of awesome, and he blowed stuff up real good. He even got a decent death, taking arrow shots like Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring without giving up the fight and even managing to tell off the killer before finally dying. Aside from a couple of really nice kills, like the girl at the beginning getting chopped in half vertically, that's about it for what was right with the movie. I doubt my server has the capacity for a full list of what was wrong, so I'll hit the high points. The characters, of course, were stereotypical one-dimensional morons. We've got the Emo Vegan, the Lesbian Marine, the Annoying Jerk, the Black Guy, the Hot Chick, the Producer, the Producer's Girlfriend, etc. I was quickly very obvious that the Emo Vegan and the Black Guy had been chosen as Final Girl and Guy despite being idiots, and this alone allowed them to survive through the end of the movie. In the final battle, we were all praying that Henry Rollins would wind up surviving by blowing up everyone else with his dynamite arrows, but it was not to be. There's nothing particularly interesting in the story either. Cannibalistic mutant inbred hillbillies have been done to death in the movies. There aren't any innovations here, nor is there any consistency with the original movie (yes, I went and looked up the plot). Apparently the first time around, it was generations of inbreeding that gave us our villains. This time, it was only two generations of inbreeding, combined with toxic waste from the local paper factory. This gave them super strength and the ability to recover from almost any injury, as is usually the case. In the end, it was pretty terrible. I definitely do not recommend buying it. But if you've got a movie night coming up with a group of slasher flick fans, I do recommend renting it. In a group like that, it's actually a surprisingly entertaining, and Henry makes it very watchable. Thanks to him, I'll give it 0.4 Bolls.