Wrong Turn (2003)

Wrong Turn tells the story of a group of college-educated youths who take a shortcut through the West Virginia mountains and run afoul of a family of Republicans. It all starts with some tire damage caused by traps set by the Republicans. A quartet from among the college kids peels off in search of help and locates a ramshackle hutment, but when they find human remains inside, they realize that Republicanism is none too far away. Soon enough, the Republicans arrive home with the freshly riven corpse of one of the college students who’d stayed with the vehicle. From their hiding places, the surviving college kids have no choice but to watch as the Republicans dismember and devour their friend. When the Republicans fall into a satiated sleep, the college kids attempt to escape, but the Republicans are jolted awake and chase them into the forest, picking them off one by one. The urbanized college youths hide in trees, lookout towers, and caves to evade their pursuers, but the Republicans doggedly sniff them out. Can young, college-educated Americans survive the relentless Republican onslaught?

Upon its release, critics were initially hard on Wrong Turn. Scott Foundas of Variety describes the film as “frightless torpor”; Rotten Tomatoes calls it an “unremarkable slasher flick.” But these reviews come from a much different point in history. For those of us who survived the Trump presidency, the film rings irrefutably true and even prescient. In both mood and manner, these inbred, cannibalistic Republicans remind us of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. As such, Wrong Turn is not a “slasher flick,” but rather a fictive, filmic ethnography of America. While it is not nearly as deranged as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the ne plus ultra of American ethnographic cinema, Wrong Turn is nonetheless an honest film in perfect fidelity with the base culture that spawned it. Even more than it entertains, Wrong Turn educates us about a subspecies of Republican that American civilization would do well to avoid.

All told, Wrong Turn comes highly recommended, as it's an unrelenting thrill-ride that doesn’t let up, not even after the Republicans have been neutralized and the plot has resolved itself (hence, a mild spoiler alert here). Stick around for the credits, and you’ll learn along with an unfortunate deputy sheriff a harsh lesson about American life—the truest Republicans are the hardest to kill.