I watched both Wrong Turn and Wrong Turn 2: Dead End this weekend, and thought I'd write a short post about them.  The first movie had a group of people who get stranded in the West Virginia woods after a vehicle accident, and as they try to find a road back to civilisation, they are attacked and killed one by one, by a group of deformed cannibalistic inbred mutants!  Who will survive?  The 2003 movie was an above-average thriller that provided some tense moments and nice atmosphere, punctuated by spurts of blood and brutal violence.  Starring Eliza Duskhu and Desmond Harrington, it was directed by Rob Schmidt.

When it was announced that a sequel was being made to this, and additionally, that it would be a direct-to-DVD release, I was pretty skeptical.  Was this really needed?  But once the sequel was released, I started hearing a lot of good things about it.  After having watched it, I'd say it was worth the praise!

In Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, a reality show is being filmed in the West Virginian country, and the contestants are divided into groups and left alone in the woods.  It's not long before they are attacked by the cannibalistic hillbillies who happen to inhabit that area.  While the setup isn't anything that we haven't seen before, the movie did provide a constant supply of graphic kills, done in very creative ways!  You see, the first scene shows a woman being split in two vertically, with an axe, and the two halves being dragged away by the cannibals.  That sort of sets the tone for things to come!

Apparently the movie was shot in 25 days, and I think they must have spent most of the money they had on the gore effects, which are all done very convincingly!  The movie is energetically directed by Joe Lynch, and the acting is pretty decent too.  Henry Rollins is the tough retired army officer who is the host of the reality show, and Erica Leerhsen (who I remember from Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [2004 Remake]) plays one of the contestants.  The other stars I did not really recognise but they did a good job.  In fact, everything about this movie is a cut above what you'd expect from a direct-to-DVD release.  Suffice to say, they did a great job on this one.

Above is a drawing I did of Erica Leerhsen from the movie.  How I came to do that, is like this — recently, I'd moved a lot of stuff out of my computer's hard disk onto my external drive, and then I sorted some stuff into 4.37 GB-sized folders.  I then wrote these out on DVDs and deleted the data from the computer.  As lots of data (a couple of years worth of photos, videos and other downloads) was being written, I couldn't do much else on the computer while Nero was running.  So I just decided to do a quick drawing of whatever was on my desktop, so that resulted in this.  Done using black ballpoint pen (same one I used for my Saw IV Comic) on paper.  You can click the image above for a larger version.