Pre-Fantastic Fest Movies

Wrong Turn 2 Movie Review

I was luckily enough to see several of the movies that are going to be at Austin Fantastic Fest 2007. Some of these are definitely worth watching and some are just rental only. Over the next week leading up to the festival i'll be reviewing them daily. Look for reviews for Taxidermia, Flight of the Living Dead, Flash Point, The Ferryman and maybe others if i have time.

First up is Wrong Turn 2. This movie franchise is eerily similar to The Hills Have Eyes franchise. Both of them feature cannibalistic mutated hillbilly families, both of the first installments took a serious horror approach and both sequels were not near as good and went more of the action/gore route.

Its not that I hated Wrong Turn 2 its more that i was disappointed. The original Wrong Turn had great pacing, acting, and great makeup and gore effects by Stan Winston so I was hoping of more of the same. Its starts off with a great cameo by American Idolist Kimberly Caldwell who gets the movie started off with an awesome death scene.

The movie is about this Survivor style reality Tv show with Henry Rollins as an ex army Sargent as the host. There are 6 contestants that are competing to be the last person standing and win the 100,000 dollar prize. Henry does a great job for what he's given but the rest of them are pretty much B level movie actors. It doesnt help they were all cliched characters with paper thin character development. I did like the Hillbilly Dad he was surprisingly good for his role. Now ive seen several other straight to dvd reality tv based horror movies that were absolutely horrible, usually because of budget constraints, but they did manage to make up an intriguing game for the most part. So the contestants split up in 3 teams of 2 and go off into the woods to look for some food while trying to avoid traps that need to be disarmed in a certain time frame or the contestant gets eliminated.

Well surprise, surprise once they split off they start getting hunted and picked off one by one by the mutant family. Even though you can tell it had a limited budget there still managed to be some great gore and kills. There was one with dynamite in particular that had me smiling from ear to ear.

In spite of all this it definitely had its problems. The whole movie was filmed entirely in daylight and there never was any tension or even jump scares throughout the movie. I cant even recall the musical score for that matter. Some of the makeup jobs were not as good as I would have liked.The movie does move at a brisk pace and seems to end all too fast. I had some fun with it but like a blow up doll, its serviceable but not even as good as the real thing! Only recommended for hardcore fans of this type of genre. On a scale of 1-10 i give it a hillbilly hatchet 5.0

Here are two of the hotties from the movie.



Heres the trailer