Whilst trying to get to a very important interview Chris Flynn meets horrendous traffic that apparently wont clear up for hours. On an important deadline, he decides to turn back and find a shortcut, after a while he drives into an old gas station and tries to use the broken pay phone. Receiving a less than enthusiastic greeting from the shops owner, he just looks at a map attached to one of the walls, and discovers a shortcut through the woods, which should get him to his destination well in time. Whilst travelling through his new route, he smashes into a van, rendering his car unusable and hurting his back, on the crash site he meets the owners of the other car -who have just discovered that their vehicle broke down because somebody set a long piece of barbed wire across the road- and joins up with three of them (the plucky Jessie Burlingame, slightly annoying Carly and the love struck Scott) to find some help, leaving two of the twenty something's back at the crash site where they quite happily proceed in having as much sex and drugs as possible, but wait, isn't that a shadow lurking behind the trees?

Wrong Turn made quite a splash in 2003 as there was only limited advertising buzz surrounding it, due to even the tamer scenes being too 'intense' to make trailers out of and what they did show disgusted many movie goers, but to be honest I don't think this movie is all about gore. Wrong Turn succeeds where other recent horror flicks have failed because it doesn't rely on gore to scare the audience it is just there to make the viewers squirm (one scene in the hut, when the cannibals eat a young woman is particularly grizzly) but the real trick is in the slow building tension, that this little thriller establishes so well. I don't think I could say that I was scared by this film, but I can tell you that I was on the edge of my seat for the most part -and covering my eyes for the rest- by the end I felt battered as this film is a no holds barred attempt at film making and actually, much to my surprise works very well.

I am pleased to say, that for a teenage horror flick the performances in Wrong Turn are actually fairly good. Desmond Harrington is convincing as he strong doctor, I believed in his character and his bravery and strength and also thought that he allowed the more emotional aspects of his role shine through (even though the characterisation is very minimal) Desmond delivers the dialogue with professionalism and gathers a good chemistry with cast (it is most potent with Dushku)

Surprisingly the script for Wrong Turn (penned by Alan B. McElroy) is very unhollywoodish and fairly intelligent, there are attempts at keeping the characters human as we do get a bit of emotion trickle through and the premise although unoriginal and unrealistic allows for a lot of avenues to be explored, the well scripted 'frightening scenes' are often hair raising and the action is structured well, never allowing to pace to become slow. Sadly though Wrong Turns screenplay is far from perfect, a lot of the backup characters are wooden and two dimensional, some of the elaborately gory set pieces are over the top and some of the decisions that the young group make are excruciatingly unrealistic.

One of the main problems I had with Wrong Turn, is that it runs out of steam pretty quickly. As the cast is relatively small the body count isnt very high, which means that although the thrills stay up for the final quarter as only a few survivors try to escape, it stops becoming a fast and furious horror and turns into and edgy thriller, which may disappoint some horror veterans (something I am most defiantly not)

Carly: I think if you ever want to get in my pants again...
Scott: Affirmative.
Carly: ...this is the last time you use the "e" word. Okay?