Discover Top Posts Tagged with #alan mcelroy

Curse of the Spawn #9 "Limbo"

Story by Alan McElroy

Pencils by Dwayne Turner

Inks by Danny Miki

Letters by Tom Orzechowski

#Angela #Hellspawn #alan mcelroy #curse of the spawn #spawn #hellspawn #image comics #90s comics #danny miki #spawns universe

BLOGTOBER 10/7/2018: WRONG TURN

This is SUCH. A GOOD MOVIE.

Although admittedly, my personal experience of this movie is so epic that I’m not capable of being very nuanced about it.

I saw WRONG TURN when it came out in 2003, in a mall, in Memphis. It was during the third act of a cross-country road trip I took with @ladyphibes, who on the last night of that college semester drove us to a Cramps show in Manhattan, then straight on to a Fangoria event in Burbank, to another Cramps show at a hootenanny in the desert, to the current location of the original TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE house in Kingsland TX, to New Orleans, where I very quickly ruined our single evening of gothy fun by becoming as drunk as I have ever been in my entire life before sundown. She patiently drove us to Graceland the following morning, and after that profoundly moving experience, we weren’t sure what to do with ourselves. She parked us on a Memphis street that was populated by bail-bonds places as far as the eye could see, including one whose sign bragged, “SERVING” THE PUBLIC SINCE 1972! Not really seeing the appeal of wandering around Beale Street with watered down drinks in whalebone containers, we decided to see what was playing at the movie theater in the nearest shopping mall. IDENTITY had just come out, as well as WRONG TURN. We expected IDENTITY to be interesting, and WRONG TURN to be probably kinda bad, but mindless fun in the best case scenario. As it turned out, the John Cusack-led wannabe mindfuck was almost intolerably pretentious, and the TEXAS CHAINSAW-ripoff-lookin’ slasher movie was AN ABSOLUTE DELIGHT. Perhaps even more to the local audience than it was to our yankee asses; every time there was a gag at the expense of WRONG TURN’s stranded urbanites, evil-sounding cackles would tumble down from the back of the theater, and my friend and I were reminded of who we were and where we were. We left the theater exhilarated, which was good since it was quite late, and we knew we probably shouldn’t sleep in the car on bail-bonds row. Around 3 or 4 in the morning, we passed into Arkansas in search of a rest stop. Sitting underneath the big WELCOME TO ARKANSAS highway sign was a huge, regal mountain lion, its eyes flashing in our headlights. Of course I was the only one who saw it, but it remains symbolic of that leg of the trip in my mind.

Anyway. WRONG TURN is real great. This time around, it was exactly as entertaining as I remembered it, which is very special in and of itself because my primary motivation for watching movies is not what you would call traditional entertainment. I most look forward to being frightened, saddened, or even offended. I want to have my boundaries pushed, I want to find out how I respond to frank torment, whether or not it falls within the definition of what you’d typically call horror. I don’t tend to go in for like, high-flying adventure, and action-y thrills and chills. Yet, this movie has all that in spades, and I’m just amazed by how well it works. As I’m sure you’ve roughly guessed, the movie concerns a gang of callow, care-free cityslickers, plus a stuck-up money-grubbing doctor, who find themselves marooned deep in the wilds of West Virginia. Naturally, they’re presently pursued by a family of chromosomally impaired cannibals until only the fittest survive. WRONG TURN is unbelievably well-paced, with scenes of grueling torture (physical, thanks to Stan Winston, and psychical, thanks to writer Alan McElroy...who made his debut with HALLOWEEN 4??) that are kept buoyant by an absolutely relentless sense of suspense. More than that, even though this is basically a one-set proposition, director Rob Schmidt makes our heroes’ journey through the primordial forest colorful and engaging. We move from acrophobia-inducing mountain ranges to an astounding chase scene through the interwoven limbs of country pines. I barely understand how that particular stretch works; the audience only sees so much of this three-dimensional chase scene, but it still has to make sense, so the production needs to have a rendering of how those trees are situated across all axes in order to make it all convincing and not confusing, and...it’s just amazing. WRONG TURN is an incredibly entertaining, action-packed movie, that even a killjoy like myself is forced to appreciate.

...but don’t think I haven’t found an irritatingly angsty subtext for this movie! The thing that makes all these cheap thrills stick for me is the characterization of the two leads, Desmond Harrington and Eliza Dushku. Ordinarily, in a slasher movie like this, people survive because they’re so pure of heart. They don’t participate in any vices, or contribute to any societal ills. It won’t surprise anyone when the first people to get bumped off are a couple of stoners who refuse to help with the hunt for a payphone, but our remaining contestants are:

- A woman who is the witless cause of this whole mess, because she couldn’t maintain her last relationship and her friends are trying to cheer her up with a camping trip;

- A doctor who finds himself stranded with these strangers because he has been breaking all kinds of traffic laws trying to make it to a lucrative business meeting;

- A man and a woman who are really, deeply, sincerely in love, and looking forward to their wedding (including Jeremy Sisto, who is doing a really open impression of Jeff Goldblum, but it’s so ridiculous you kind of have to forgive him).

So, you’d think the greedy corporate jerk, or the sexually dysfunctional woman might be the next to bite it. But you’d think wrong, because the world of WRONG TURN is one in which pragmatism and self-serving survival instincts are the most rewarded human qualities. The demise of the lovers is unusually painful and unfair-seeming, and I appreciate that too--but I really enjoy the ultimate success of the non-couple characters, who are such a pair of cold fish. They seem to form an early, understanding bond with one another, but nothing physical ever comes of it; there is no kiss, no tryst in the romantic hideaway they discover behind a waterfall. Desmond Harrington and Eliza Dushku get along because they know about survival and mortality, and how the arbitrariness of life degrades even our most deeply fetishized ideals, like “true love”. It’s a wonderful feeling, not to feel so condescendingly jacked off by a movie in the name of nonsense virtues like innocence and sentimentality. Even if this all sounds absolutely harrowing--well, it will be! But I want to insist that uninitiated viewers give it a shot. WRONG TURN is blackstrap molasses and wheatgerm bread for the soul.

PS We went to a third Cramps show on that trip, I thought in Illinois, I just forget exactly how it fit in.

#wrong turn #2003 #stan winston #rob schmidt #jeremy sisto #eliza dushku #desmond harrington #alan mcelroy #horror #slasher #blogtober #spoilers