The horror film Wrong Turn is not for the faint of heart or the faint of stomach. It's everything it promises to be -- and more, churn- your-stomach more.

Somewhere in the woods of West Virginia, lives a family of cannibalistic mountain men.

Fortunately for them, people keep taking the back roads, drop in to fish, hunt, hike or climb the hills, so they're never at a loss for food.

You might ask why police have never come across their hideaway when searching for lost tourists, fishermen, hikers and travellers, but that would be bringing logic to a film that exists solely to shock and unsettle its audiences.

The film, which includes Kevin Zegers of Woodstock (as Evan) in its cast, opens with a pair of climbers scaling a rock face.

The man reaches the top first, chides his female partner for lagging behind, then disappears.

When he appears again, he is crawling toward the cliff trying to escape something that has his face contorted into a grimace of terror.

The movie refuses to let up for the next 80 minutes, bombarding the audience with crunching bones, blood spatter and brief glimpses of deformed limbs dragging mutilated corpses.

No one is pretending Wrong Turn is sweet family entertainment and director Rob Schmidt really piles on the gore in a scene inside the mountain men's cabin as they butcher corpses.

There was an episode of The X-Files that dealt with the idea of deformed, in-bred people living in close proximity to civilization.

It was creepy, but it never approached, let alone crossed, the boundaries of good taste that Wrong Turn does.

This flick is reminiscent of such '70s horror gorefests as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes.

As nauseating as those little horror movies were, they both spawned sequels even more graphic, so there is an audience out there for such ghastly horror excess, especially when it is so slickly made.

The suspense and terror in Wrong Turn is unrelenting and the acting solid for a film that presents caricatures, not characters.

Desmond Harrington and Eliza Dushku turn into revenge warriors after the mountain men stalk and kill their four friends, but even they don't come away completely unscathed.

As long as you don't take a wrong turn and wander into this film thinking it's a run-of-the-mill horror flick, you'll have fun.

Otherwise, you probably won't last more than about 20 minutes or end up screaming, squirming and hiding your eyes.

WRONG TURN * * 1/2

What: Horror directed by Rob Schmidt

Starring: Desmond Harrington, Eliza Dushku, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Jeremy Sisto (with Kevin Zegers of Woodstock)

Classification: 18A

Where: Huron Market Place, 1251 Huron St. (453-4672); SilverCity, Masonville Place (673-4125); Westmount, 785 Wonderland Rd. (474-2152)