Ain't No Mountain High Enough
"That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery."
Thinking about Thomas 'Tom' Jane in The Punisher got me thinking about the first time they tried to translate that particular anti-hero to the big screen. Remember? It was 1989, and somebody in a dimly-lit room in Hollywood said: "Hey, guys, how about Dolph Lundgren and Louis Gossett Jr. in a movie based on a comic about a sociopathic vigilante who thinks he's fighting a one-man war against crime and kills pretty much anybody who gets in his way? We'll make millions!"
He was very, very wrong, just like whoever pitched Wrong Turn to Fox some fifteen years later, saying something like: "Hey, guys, how about the bad slayer from Buffy and that guy from Riding In Cars With Boys in a teens-get-lost-in-dark-woods homage to Deliverance crossed with every aimless, soul-sucking horror movie released since Scream?"
Sounds like such fun, doesn't it?
That said, the first five minutes are actually quite promising. We kick off with a cliched but entertaining prologue featuring a boy and a girl being murdered by unseen baddies. This segues neatly into a genuinely creepy title sequence that mixes flashes of headlines past about mountain men, inbreeding, and folks disappearing with photos of disfigured faces and unnaturally sharp teeth. All this occasionally accompanied by background images of the girl we've just seen murdered being caressed by a dirty, clawed hand.
And that's the best bit of the film. Beyond the credits, I'm afraid it's an eighty minute vacation to Suckville. Let's go!
Desmond Harrington IS Chris Flynn, an unassuming twenty-something medical student on his way to some kind of interview. Unfortunately for Chris, he gets caught up in a traffic jam and, in looking for a shortcut, takes a WRONG TURN. See what they did there? So cool.
Funniest part of the whole movie was, for me, when Chris gets out of his car and goes up to the truck in front of him to ask what's going on and then whether there's some way around. The driver, a weasel-faced redneck, directs him to "go back to your car, adjust your hair about another thousand times..." and Chris has no response except to walk away. Yup, our hero has been wittily bested by a greasy trucker who is, frankly, absolutely right.
So Chris, looking like an arsehole, finds this 'shortcut'. Then he gets distracted by a dead deer and crashes into a camper van, totalling both vehicles. The van's occupants - Eliza Dushku, that guy who was in Six Feet Under, and some kids who were in stuff like The Skulls 2 and MVP: Most Valuable Primate - take this alarmingly well, and take Chris in like a long lost brother. The group then splits into two, with the main four characters going to find help and the other two remaining behind to spout shitty sub-Kevin Smith dialogue, smoke weed, fuck, and get torn apart by inbred mountain men.
So Chris, Jessie (Eliza), the guy from Six Feet Under, and some other girl find this house, and - OHMYGOD - it turns out to be the house of the inbred mountain men, with, like, ears in the fridge and stuff. And then - HEAVENFORBID - the inbred mountain men come home, and Chris and Jessie and the guy from Six Feet Under and the other girl have to hide in the house while the girl who got stoned and then fucked and then killed gets cut up with a hacksaw and eaten. Which she clearly deserved. She was annoying and she was in American Psycho II. With William Shatner.
Later, the mountain men go to sleep and the kids escape, only they make too much noise and wake up the mountain men, who chase them FOR THE REST OF THE FILM. Six Feet Under guy gets shot with arrows, the other girl takes an axe to the mouth (which I'll admit was somewhat cool. She was annoying, too. And she was in Snow Day), and then, just when you're sure that Chris will rescue Jessie from the hideous mountain men who for some reason have only kidnapped her when they immediately murdered everybody else, he does. Mountain men die, boy and girl escape, roll credits.
What a fucking waste of my life.
And there is NO character development or plot in this movie. None at all. There is absolutely no reason to give a shit about any of these people. In fact, I found myself rooting for Mountain Man #2, who had a bow and arrow and was fucking awesome. First he killed the Six Feet Under kid with three arrows to the back, all in the same spot, from about a hundred feet away, THEN he killed the park ranger with a single shot to the EYE from about two hundred feet away while standing on an incline. He was like the inbred redneck Robin Hood. See, while I wouldn't pay money to see Wrong Turn, I would definitely shell out the necessary green to see a prequel called Ain't No Mountain High Enough, about the adventures of Mountain Man #2, who was once an olympic archer but was hideously disfigured saving a kitten from a housefire. Unable to show his face, he fled to the mountains, where he was adopted by Cletus and Jethro, two really nice guys who were marginalised from society after Deliverance and The Hills Have Eyes came out. All Cletus and Jethro and MM #2 want is to be left alone to live their peaceful lives, but these vanloads of twenty-somethings keep turning up to TAUNT them with their vapid, Hollywood beauty. One day, something in MM #2 just snaps...
There we go. Just like that, I've made Wrong Turn into a fucking Shakespearean tragedy. Which is no reason for you to go and see it, by the way. It's still an insufferable pile of shit.
Thinking about Thomas 'Tom' Jane in The Punisher got me thinking about the first time they tried to translate that particular anti-hero to the big screen. Remember? It was 1989, and somebody in a dimly-lit room in Hollywood said: "Hey, guys, how about Dolph Lundgren and Louis Gossett Jr. in a movie based on a comic about a sociopathic vigilante who thinks he's fighting a one-man war against crime and kills pretty much anybody who gets in his way? We'll make millions!"
He was very, very wrong, just like whoever pitched Wrong Turn to Fox some fifteen years later, saying something like: "Hey, guys, how about the bad slayer from Buffy and that guy from Riding In Cars With Boys in a teens-get-lost-in-dark-woods homage to Deliverance crossed with every aimless, soul-sucking horror movie released since Scream?"
Sounds like such fun, doesn't it?
That said, the first five minutes are actually quite promising. We kick off with a cliched but entertaining prologue featuring a boy and a girl being murdered by unseen baddies. This segues neatly into a genuinely creepy title sequence that mixes flashes of headlines past about mountain men, inbreeding, and folks disappearing with photos of disfigured faces and unnaturally sharp teeth. All this occasionally accompanied by background images of the girl we've just seen murdered being caressed by a dirty, clawed hand.
And that's the best bit of the film. Beyond the credits, I'm afraid it's an eighty minute vacation to Suckville. Let's go!
Desmond Harrington IS Chris Flynn, an unassuming twenty-something medical student on his way to some kind of interview. Unfortunately for Chris, he gets caught up in a traffic jam and, in looking for a shortcut, takes a WRONG TURN. See what they did there? So cool.
Funniest part of the whole movie was, for me, when Chris gets out of his car and goes up to the truck in front of him to ask what's going on and then whether there's some way around. The driver, a weasel-faced redneck, directs him to "go back to your car, adjust your hair about another thousand times..." and Chris has no response except to walk away. Yup, our hero has been wittily bested by a greasy trucker who is, frankly, absolutely right.
So Chris, looking like an arsehole, finds this 'shortcut'. Then he gets distracted by a dead deer and crashes into a camper van, totalling both vehicles. The van's occupants - Eliza Dushku, that guy who was in Six Feet Under, and some kids who were in stuff like The Skulls 2 and MVP: Most Valuable Primate - take this alarmingly well, and take Chris in like a long lost brother. The group then splits into two, with the main four characters going to find help and the other two remaining behind to spout shitty sub-Kevin Smith dialogue, smoke weed, fuck, and get torn apart by inbred mountain men.
So Chris, Jessie (Eliza), the guy from Six Feet Under, and some other girl find this house, and - OHMYGOD - it turns out to be the house of the inbred mountain men, with, like, ears in the fridge and stuff. And then - HEAVENFORBID - the inbred mountain men come home, and Chris and Jessie and the guy from Six Feet Under and the other girl have to hide in the house while the girl who got stoned and then fucked and then killed gets cut up with a hacksaw and eaten. Which she clearly deserved. She was annoying and she was in American Psycho II. With William Shatner.
Later, the mountain men go to sleep and the kids escape, only they make too much noise and wake up the mountain men, who chase them FOR THE REST OF THE FILM. Six Feet Under guy gets shot with arrows, the other girl takes an axe to the mouth (which I'll admit was somewhat cool. She was annoying, too. And she was in Snow Day), and then, just when you're sure that Chris will rescue Jessie from the hideous mountain men who for some reason have only kidnapped her when they immediately murdered everybody else, he does. Mountain men die, boy and girl escape, roll credits.
What a fucking waste of my life.
And there is NO character development or plot in this movie. None at all. There is absolutely no reason to give a shit about any of these people. In fact, I found myself rooting for Mountain Man #2, who had a bow and arrow and was fucking awesome. First he killed the Six Feet Under kid with three arrows to the back, all in the same spot, from about a hundred feet away, THEN he killed the park ranger with a single shot to the EYE from about two hundred feet away while standing on an incline. He was like the inbred redneck Robin Hood. See, while I wouldn't pay money to see Wrong Turn, I would definitely shell out the necessary green to see a prequel called Ain't No Mountain High Enough, about the adventures of Mountain Man #2, who was once an olympic archer but was hideously disfigured saving a kitten from a housefire. Unable to show his face, he fled to the mountains, where he was adopted by Cletus and Jethro, two really nice guys who were marginalised from society after Deliverance and The Hills Have Eyes came out. All Cletus and Jethro and MM #2 want is to be left alone to live their peaceful lives, but these vanloads of twenty-somethings keep turning up to TAUNT them with their vapid, Hollywood beauty. One day, something in MM #2 just snaps...
There we go. Just like that, I've made Wrong Turn into a fucking Shakespearean tragedy. Which is no reason for you to go and see it, by the way. It's still an insufferable pile of shit.
posted by Michael at 9:39 PM
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