Film Review: Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort

Copyright: 20th Century Fox

Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort takes a group of young people deep into the Appalachian Mountains, where one of them, a failed Wall Street worker called Danny, recently inherited an isolated hotel. Danny, who was adopted as a child, also learned that he was born in those parts, and still had living relatives. There, strange locals welcome them, and seem very interested in Danny. While other rest and fornicate, Danny begins to explore his roots in the wild, ungoverned land that begins behind the hotel (and later on, even in it).

Wrong Turn 6 is a splatter film that resolves mostly around gore and simple but gruesome murders. It follows Danny on his path of transformation, but female characters, mostly captured by solid performances by Sadie Katz and Aqueela Zoll, provide the real conflict of the film.

The interesting fact about this film is that is pretty much ignores many horror key points like the rise of resistance in the characters (there are only weak notions of this, but nothing like I would regularly expect) or the notion that some kind of help is on the way. It looks like Milev was cheering for the bad guys, and that he didn’t really want to harm them in any way.

At the same time, the film, both in terms of the script and the director, didn’t have a problem with sex and nudity. Almost every female character engages in at least one heterosexual encounter (some of them, like the first one in the forest spring, are simulated so incorrectly that they almost look comical) which also include breasts and nipples. During all these scenes of love making, there are underlining themes of lust and primal freedom in the wilderness, which works with the broader narrative, but I still feel that it was all done so that teenagers can get their kicks.

Fortunately, the bad guy camp was split into two separate groups, so that there is a target for some sort of righteous retribution. Without this, the Wrong Turn 6 full movie would be one long story full of bad things that happens to attractive girls and their male friends, which isn’t really bad, but it’s also not really a horror film.