Wrong Turn 2: Dead End: Henry Rollins' (second?)-best film?

NOTE: I have added a comment at the end of this with some final reflections.

Like many of you, I suspect, I have seen a couple of not-so-good movies starring Henry Rollins, like, say, Johnny Mnemonic, The Devil's Tomb, or Morgan's Ferry (reviewed by me here; I state categorically that "Hank can't act" in that review but bear in mind I had not yet seen him well-used in a movie, at that point. He Never Died was yet to come). There are definitely some good films he is in (Lost Highway, Heat) but they're basically just cameos, not particularly satisfying from the point of view of your average Black Flag fan: "Hey, look, it's Henry!" ...then you go back to watching the film, which neither lives nor dies by Hank's presence, especially since he's only on screen for a few minutes.

Occasionally, however, you get a film that not only is well-made and original but knows what to do with Rollins and COMMITS to the idea of putting him in a lead role, and creates a character he can fully inhabit. He Never Died may still be the best of them, but it now has competition: I'm finally catching up with Wrong Turn 2; Dead End (on pause as I write this: I am taking a break to blurt enthusiasm at you before I finish the film).

For the record, you don't need to worry before sitting down to this film about not having seen Wrong Turn, the first film in the franchise -- it is a thoroughly average West Virginia Hills Have Eyes variant, competent but undistinguished, with your usual in-bred, dentally-deficient backwoods caricatures (grossly sculpted by Stan Winston) killing passers-by and butchering them, grunting incoherently at each other, as they have devolved to sub-linguistic depths. It's actually a peeve of mine when these films deprive their cannibal characters of spoken dialogue -- as with The Colony or Tooth and Nail; it's just a cheat, a workaround around the issue of putting believable words in their mouths. Why shouldn't a cannibal, even an in-bred rural mutant, be able to speak? I'm always fonder of films where the cannibals are given voice (The Hills Have Eyes is a fine example, but see also Texas Chainsaw -- I guess Leatherface is a bit inarticulate, but some of his family members are quite chatty -- which is to say nothing of Ravenous or We Are What We Are, or... actually, Rollins is a cannibal of sorts in He Never Died...). I'm hoping the backwoods characters in Wrong Turn 2 get to speak for themselves a little... Looks like they might...

I'm trying to think of things that make the first Wrong Turn stand out and besides one memorable (but not very well-executed) kill, the only real one I can come up with is that one of the film's characters quips, "You've seen Deliverance, right?" That's about as meta as the first film gets; it's mostly content to just do things you've seen before, in slightly different locations, like it thinks you can acknowledge genre tropes  and still employ them without raising things to a new level...

The second Wrong Turn, however (Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, from 2007) looks to be as brilliant as the first is average, taking the "outdoor ordeal" the protagonists must endure and going very meta with it, making them contestants in a reality show ("Survive the Apocalypse!" or something; one character even has a Battle Royale t-shirt on). Rollins -- who is so free to just blast full-on Rollins at the screen that you almost expect him to be playing himself, like he's going to say, "I'm Henry Rollins!" into the camera when his character introduces himself* -- plays the ex-Marine host joining them in the woods. No one realizes that there are actual murderous in-breds out there (though we do, as we've seen one character get split neatly in half and carried off by the arms... one killer dragging half of her by the left wrist, the second dragging the other half by the right; it's right up there with Ichi the Killer in terms of gory excess).

I think by the end of it I'm going to emerge still preferring He Never Died, because it's such a fresh, creative premise (and has a bingo scene in it; I have an inexplicable fondness for bingo in cinema -- Rampage, Highway 61, He Never Died...). But Wrong Turn 2 is a vast improvement on the first film. Seek it out if you haven't! 

POST-VIEWING POST-SCRIPT:

Just to affirm, indeed, the film runs out of fresh ideas at about the mid-point and becomes just the good guys versus the bad guys in the woods (and in an abandoned paper mill), but there is some pretty demented gore, some pretty twisted sexual stuff, and a few entertaining lines of dialogue (Rollins, shot with two arrows, growls at the killers, "Is that all you've got, fuckers?" or words to that effect; he's fun throughout, a perfect bit of casting, and I only just realized that his co-star was my favourite actor in Blair Witch 2, Erica Leerhsen ). Plus (I had not realized before) the film is shot in Vancouver. I still recommend it, but I don't think I'm going to ever sit down to it twice. 

Addendum: What the hell, Julian Richings is in one of these films! 

*Someone should do this, make a meta-level horror movie where Rollins plays himself. Give the man his JCVD moment, you know? I'd watch that.