Starring: Eliza Dushku, Jeremy Sisto, Emmanuelle Chriqui

6 out of 10 stars

Query: If someone makes an effective horror movie, casts it with appealing actors, pours on the suspense and gore in equal amounts, doses it with some intelligence and paces it so well that your heart can't help but race, will anyone in this post-Scream/Scary Movie age care? Or go to see it? That's the question that Wrong Turn begs. On the outside, it looks like exploitation city, a rip-off of such seminal horror flicks as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, with sexy, screaming teens and backwoods freaks carrying a wide array of cutlery. Scratch the surface, though, and you'll find something that puts recent horror crap like Darkness Falls, They and Final Destination 2 to shame. There really hasn't been a slasher-type flick this suspenseful, and this fun since… well, since the Scream movies.

Doing for the backwoods of West Virginia what The Blair Witch Project did for the Maryland camping and forestry industry, Wrong Turn starts off with a bang – literally, as hunky Chris (Desmond Harrington) slams his mint-condition Mustang into an SUV carrying the camping equipment of five pals off for an impromptu hike. (It's one of many sad deaths – that car is really quite lovely.) Chris is late for some kind of interview, the pals have had a blowout, and now both their cars are totaled. The only gas station is miles away, housing a toothless freak and an out-of-order pay phone. There's no cell phone service either, and what do ya know? Someone strung barbed wire across the road! Chris takes off with alpha female Jessie (Eliza Dushku) and lovey-dovey engageds Carly and Scott (Emmanuelle Chriqui and Jeremy Sisto) to find a phone or something. Francine and Evan (Lindy Booth and Kevin Zegers) stay behind to watch the cars and camping stuff – while they get stoned and have sex. Guess who gets offed first.

The plot is as hopelessly retro as that of Down with Love, as the kids go through the paces of Horror Movie 101: creepy house found, friends wind up dead, chase ensues with knife-wielding freaks, kids get picked off one by one, then start to fight back. What you don't realize until you're in the thick of it is that director Rob Schmidt (Crime and Punishment in Suburbia) has added something 9 out of 10 recent horror flicks have neglected: actual suspense. Combined with some pretty nice visuals (West Virginia never looked so pretty or foreboding – even if it is Ontario), some better-than-average dialogue, and characters you actually care a little about, and you've got 85 minutes of nice adrenaline rush.

And the cast, unlike the bozos who've gotten offed in recent memory (name anyone from Final Destination 2 – I double dare you), are actually fine actors who wouldn't be out of place on an above-average WB show. Dushku dials down her Faith the Rogue Slayer persona from Buffy the Vampire Slayer a few notches, coming off strong but vulnerable, and offers up the woe-is-me dialogue ("It's all my fault!") with minimal pain. Harrington, despite chiseled features that seem to lock him in granite, turns out to be a pretty effective hero. And Sisto and Chriqui offer nice, appealing support, filling the sidekick niche almost as strongly as Jamie Kennedy and Rose McGowan did in the original Scream.

Okay, this isn't one for the Horror Hall of Fame, but it works where it should. Granted, the backwoods freakazoids – disfigured cannibals who apparently have cut a wide swath through the West Virginia vacationing populace – are more scary when you don't see them. Their icky faces and goofy wailing are less effective than, say, if they were just clever redneck boys with a taste for human blood. Carrying torches and sniffing out their prey, grunting and keening in the woods, they seem like cavemen in plaid and Oshkosh overalls – it's kind of like being hunted by the Quest for Fire gang after a bad trip to the outlet mall. And this is one of those get-chased-and-get-killed horror flicks, as opposed to the is-the-stalker-going-to-jump-out ones, so the death sequences are fairly fast, not nail-bitingly intense. And the obligatory sex-before-death scene is only alluded too, not shown -- the one '70s-horror detail left out.

However, everything moves so fast that you don't really think about any of this until the credits roll -- with the obligatory "sequel-anyone?" coda. But in this day of cleverer-than-thou gore and tongue-in-cheek horror, audiences probably won't discover Wrong Turn until it's on video, where it should excel as high-school-DVD-party fodder. It's too bad – this is a nifty B-movie with spirit that doesn't leave an awful aftertaste. Who would've thought that Wrong Turn would have gotten as much as it did right?