WT2: WTF

Today's hot new October straight-to-DVD sequel release: Wrong Turn 2. Director Joe Lynch angled to have it called Another Wrong Turn, but more level heads prevailed, and instead it's Wrong Turn 2: Dead End. No word on the title in Spain, where the original was called Kilometer 666.

The first film has enough fans to make 2 a profitable venture. Written by Alan McElroy, whose debut script was Halloween 4, and directed by Rob Schmidt (currently in post-production on The Alphabet Killer - check out that cast!), it made good money ($15 mil domestic and another $30 in rentals), despite being so rote an exercise that it's simply titled with one of the dismissive nicknames for the subgenre whose numbers it paints by. Various expectably good-looking young folk (Eliza Dushku, Desmond Harrington, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Jeremy Sisto) take an incorrect pathway of some kind and wind up pursued by hungry garden-variety mutant cannibal killer dealies.

If this setup is unimaginably usual, Turi Meyer and Al Septien's draft for the sequel is comically not so, though somehow still not original:

Retired Marine Colonel Dale Murphy* (Henry Rollins) hosts a reality TV show, a sort of Survivor in the remote boonies of West Virginia. Naturally, they're shooting a little too close to the cannibalizing grounds, and it all goes proverbially off script quickly.

Lead Erica Leerhsen is no stranger to this region, having played in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and Blair Witch Project 2, and, of course, working for Woody Allen twice. Besides Leerhsen and Rollins, Wrong Turn 2 features another batch of fine young folks, most of whom have at least one horror sequel to their name: Texas Battle and Crystal Lowe (Final Destination 3), Aleksa Palladino (The Ring 2), Daniella Alonso (The Hills Have Eyes II).

Other small notes:
-There's a soundtrack available, certainly unusual for a straight-to-video horror sequel.
-Fox scrapped a planned two-sided ("flipper") disc, and with it the director's commentary. It's being hosted at Dread Central for a free download.
-The film's official website includes a game called Cannibal Baseball World Series. Very timely.

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