Review of Turistas (2006) by Tibor B — 27 Feb 2011

A fairly obvious cash-in on the tourists abroad horror genre, from the devastatingly bleak outback horror Wolf Creek to Eli Roth's boneheaded Hostel films. Here things start promisingly with the opening credits mixing up the Brazilian tourist brochure-style booze, beaches and bikinis marketing with newspaper cuttings of genuine violent threats and dangers.

It's decent enough young international cast, and the script sets up some believable culture clash moments, brought about by the naivety of the westerners and a credible, not completely exploitative night of hedonism in a beach paradise.

The film does slowly descend into the same old cliches of course, here a surgeon who harvests tourist organs to help people in Rio, an eye for an eye revenge on the rumours of Brazilian children being traded on the black market for organs in the States.

Of course the filmmakers stage a genuinely queasy organ surgery scene on the blonde who gets her tits out, and any ideas that some kind of morality tale will be explored is shattered when the doctor turns out to be psychotic, and the Western kids easily outwit a silent henchman into finishing off his master.

The fact that this presumably denies lots of innocent kids of a genuine local doctor and other such more ambiguous ideas is of course ignored. The moral is that foreigners bite back, but apart from a few genre-necessary victims, Westerners will survive.