DHD99

Disclaimer: Since this is a romantic comedy, I am probably not part of its intended audience. In fact, this is a movie I would not have picked to watch, except that I heard Loudon Wainwright III did the music and I wanted to know what kind of music the "Dead Skunk" guy would do for a movie.

Having said that, I feel that the makers of this movie should have thought more about what their intended audience would and wouldn't want. This definitely follows the formula for a romantic comedy, which would mean it was aimed at women, right? But there is a lot of extremely crude humor and extremely heavyweight profanity here, and at the risk of sounding sexist, I'm guessing a lot of women would be put of by this. So maybe this isn't supposed to be a chick flick after all?

BTW, in addition to doing the music, Wainwright also has a cameo role.

In an earlier review of THE PRISONER, I stated that, `Over the course of its seventeen episodes, this offbeat spy thriller becomes further and further offbeat until it ultimately transforms into surrealistic allegory,' and that, `You can better appreciate the series if you can see the earlier episodes as preparation for what's to come.' This statement was based on the order in which I've always viewed the episodes -- the order in which I've always seen them shown in the U.S., and which was used in MPI Home Video's release back in the 1980s.

However, the A&E release has reordered the episodes according to events and dialog that place some episodes before or after others, and I'm hoping that this new order might make it easier to accept the surrealistic, allegorical note on which the series ends. The original order puts some of the more straightforward episodes first* -- `Chimes of Big Ben,' and `A, B, and C.'. This is understandable enough; the powers that be wanted to keep the audience interested by keeping the show as accessible as possible for as long as possible. But I think this also

created the expectations that in turn created the frustration with the turn the series took. In contrast, the new order puts two of the more obscure episodes first* -- `Free for All,' and `Dance of the Dead.' While this make things rough on the first-time viewer, I think it also paints a more accurate picture of the overall tone of the series, and better prepares the viewer for the ending.

*I mean, of course, after `Arrival,' which MUST come first.

Although this is a rather derivative horror movie -- a cinematic goulash made from bits of DELIVERANCE, TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, and all the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies -- it's done well, and so makes for an exciting viewing experience. The plot is genuinely suspenseful, the special effects are state of the art -- in other words, extremely nasty -- the acting is decent, and the characters, while they could have been a bit further developed, are still more real than the shooting gallery ducks that populate so many movies of this type. And there was almost none of the gratuitous sex that always seems to turn up in these movies. (In fact, one such scene was cut from the final version. It's included in the deleted scenes on the DVD.) The movie also made the wonderfully disturbing suggestion that the surrounding community, such as it was, knew exactly what this tribe of inbred monsters were doing and had decided to just let it go on. I would have liked a little more explanation of exactly how the these monsters came to be -- over and above the newspaper clippings we see at the beginning of the movie -- but I realize that really isn't the point.

My one real complaint is that WRONG TURN supports the stereotype of southerners as stupid at best and depraved at worst. I'm not s southerner myself, but I did live in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, North Carolina area for awhile, and thus have become sensitized to this issue.