But the group is not a collection of spring breakers with no future in sight - in their fold they have the owner of two bistros, an app developer, an oncologist, and more. What ultimately separates this film’s victims from other cinematic mass murders is further established through the characters’ finer points.Īs the group drinks at a local tavern, the conversation inevitably turns to the backwards nature of the townspeople, but their underestimation of these people is quickly revealed when Roades (DeZarn) criticizes the group for never having done a day’s work, never demonstrated a true usefulness in the world. What remains of the film, though, has been churned through a meat grinder so as to look quite a bit different from its predecessors. These two are the strongest attempts to ground the film in Hollywood viability, but the film otherwise belongs to the anonymous young people who will characteristically fight for their lives on a rugged mountainside. The film’s greatest effort in building a cast that will differentiate it from the original films - the oldest of which is almost 20 years old - is in the casting of Tim DeZarn as the grizzled townie who will also serve as the prophet of doom, warning worried father (played by Matthew Modine) that his daughter and her five friends may have ventured into those woods never to return. The film fleshes out its characters as none of the previous franchise entries tried to - and in defense of those films, the intent was not to inspire empathy from the audience but to dazzle and repulse through more and more over-the-top violence.īut with non-white and LGBTQ additions to the roster of would-be victims, a significant characteristic of this film is also its identifying a final girl early on in the film, when the franchise has by and large operated on a zero sum approach to the body count.
This cast of characters is unlike that of any of the original Wrong Turn films: it is not a cast of unlikable protagonists whom the audience will relish watching die horribly with gruesomely homemade, hick-influenced creativity as in the original franchise. The film’s action is led by a relatively unknown yet capable cast of 20-somethings, constructed by the filmmakers with a purposeful eye for inclusiveness and diversity. In Wrong Turn, a group of young people are besieged by a small society of wilderness dwellers that has shunned the inevitable hardships of the modern world