Wrong Turn

The press materials for Wrong Turn boast of “a film steeped in the traditions of classic ’70s-style horror movies”; if only that were true. It was true of Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses, which came and went rather quickly; Zombie’s effort, whatever its flaws, had a rotgut intensity indebted to vintage grindhouse horror. Wrong Turn tries valiantly to resurrect the psycho-hillbilly genre, a staple in modern slasher films going back to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 2000 Maniacs in 1964, but it forgets that the best horror movies of this type — Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes — had no name stars. Here, you say “Oh, that’s Eliza Dushku from Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or “Hey, Desmond Harrington from Ghost Ship” — the familiarity is comforting, and this type of movie shouldn’t be comforting. The ads for Chainsaw intoned, “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” Well, we pretty much figure Eliza Dushku will survive; she’s on the poster and everything.

Admirably, the movie wastes little time getting onto the on-ramp. A couple of rock-climbers fall victim to shadowy killers, and the standard-issue freaky opening-credits sequence briefs us on a group of deformed, inbred West Virginia “mountain men.” The deformities in question look real and horrifying, but the three actual villains are obvious boogeymen from the Stan Winston make-up studio — long-haired galoots with scraggly teeth, who speak in their own guttural language while carving up some hapless camper.

Med student Chris (Harrington, in a dead-calm performance to match Robert Patrick in Terminator 2) gets into a car accident with a bunch of teens (including Dushku, who can’t quite shake her too-cool-for-school mannerisms left over from Faith on Buffy) on a godforsaken stretch of road. Predictably, the first among them to become hillbilly fodder are the sex-and-weed-obsessed couple; the forbidding morals of these movies haven’t changed much in a quarter-century. Harrington and Dushku pair off with the “nicer” couple, who are engaged to be married and therefore earn the right to live longer. They stumble upon a ramshackle cabin crammed with the sort of squalor décor — rotting food, buzzing flies, odd things kept in jars — familiar from this movie’s ancestors (especially Chainsaw, which showed us fear in a roomful of bones and chicken feathers).

Wrong Turn, impersonally directed by Rob Schmidt from a script by longtime hack Alan McElroy (Spawn, Halloween 4), has nothing in particular going on in it aside from fight and flight. The hillbillies, inarticulate grunters seen mostly in shadow, have no personalities or desires (aside from killing people); they’re as unreachable and unintelligible as Orcs. The movie shies away from the paranoid subtext of all films of this stripe: city folk just ain’t welcome out there in the boonies, where murder and moonshine are the regional pastimes. These could be any woods, and the killers could be vampires or something, and it would make no difference to the action.

Which, as horror action goes, is somewhat lackluster. It’s the usual quick-cut, this-is-all-we-can-show-you R-rated mayhem, with such implements as axes, arrows, and barbed wire looped around the face. A scene in which several of the protagonists cower in terrified hiding while one of their number is sliced up is too brief to build up any suspense, and we don’t buy that the hillbillies don’t notice they’ve got company. A sequence up in a watchtower is just an excuse for a highly implausible tree-jumping episode. Wrong Turn isn’t insane enough to be scary, and it’s too unpleasant to be fun. The problem with the movie is that it’s really “steeped in the traditions” of the non-classic horror movies of the ’90s.

The Matrix Reloaded

There are two ways of looking at The Matrix Reloaded (and, by extension, its 1999 predecessor): Either it’s a film of ideas disguised as an action flick, or an action flick disguised as a film of ideas. The general public, I suspect, will not be drawn to this long-awaited sequel just to hear philosophical notions bandied about, though hear them it will. No, the honest response to a Matrix film is also twofold: Either the movie kicks ass or it doesn’t. As someone who was rather dismissive of the original movie, I can report that Matrix Reloaded does indeed kick whatever is put in front of it, at least on the level of comic-book/anime/techno-dweeb escapism.

We pick up Neo (Keanu “I still know kung fu” Reeves) and his un-merry band of rebels — stoic Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), PVC-clad Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), newbie Link (Harold Perrineau) — in their continuing resistance against the Matrix, a machine-generated code programmed to keep humans in unwitting bondage while using their energy for computer fuel. Interestingly, Morpheus, an unquestionable hipster sage in the first film, here is revealed to be just one voice among many in Zion, the underground city where the last free humans take shelter. Not everyone, it seems, takes Morpheus’ prophetic shtick as seriously as he himself does, though it’s a measure of this largely humorless film (Joe Pantoliano’s wise-guy Cypher is missed) that nobody tells him “Dude. There are other people besides you. Try some decaf.”

Brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski crafted a reasonable shiny-black diversion with The Matrix; I wasn’t as impressed by it as many others were, but I can see the appeal of it (mainly, it’s a computer geek’s wet dream: if you spend most of your waking life pushing floppies in and out, you might get chosen to be a kung-fu hero and get jiggy with Carrie-Anne Moss). The brothers, however, seem to have caught the George Lucas disease — they’ve become too smitten with the perfume of their own borrowed ideas (not only from pop culture but from philosophy — Lucas had Joseph Campbell, the Wachowskis genuflect towards Derrida and Baudrillard). Maybe they read too many furrowed-brow essays on The Phenomenology of The Matrix.

Whatever the case, every twenty minutes or so, we get an action sequence (more on those in a minute) designed to outdo everything else ever; between the money scenes, we get characters standing at attention and burping prophecies and deep thoughts at each other. Whenever a new character called the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim) opens his mouth, cheese falls out: “I know this because I must know.” Glad you clarified that, Sparky. Another new character, the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson), drones on (in a French accent, yet) about causality. But the Wachowskis save the best for last, when Neo steps into a Kubrickian white room and meets the deus ex machina himself, the Architect (Helmut Bakaitis), whose professorial white beard dislodges things like “Which brings us at last to the moment of truth wherein the fundamental flaw is ultimately expressed and the anomaly revealed as both beginning and end.” Would you like fries with that?

When it’s not brooding Gnostically about determinism and what-have-you, The Matrix Reloaded does put the extra money on the screen. When Neo’s dryly self-amused nemesis Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) replicates himself, like a virus, to form a hundred-man army against Neo, the sequence is fun if a little too PlayStation-ish. The opening Trinity-and-agent bullet-time plummet is so good it’s shown twice. And the fourteen-minute freeway chase has been and will be justly celebrated as one of the great concussive symphonies of force and momentum. Reloaded takes what I enjoyed in the original — the freaky eye candy — and cranks it up to 11. The stuff in between, I — and maybe you — can take or leave, unless you thrill to dialogue like “While it remains a burden assiduously avoided, it is not unexpected and thus not beyond a measure of control.” Yeah. What he said.