Alex (Josh Duhamel, from TV’s Las Vegas)
is escorting his little sister Bea (Olivia Wilde) and her best friend Amy
(Beau Garrett) through the wilds of rural Brazil aboard a bus. Alex isn’t so
sure that taking the bus was such a good idea, especially seeing as how the
driver is speeding it through the narrow jungle roads. Bea makes fun of his
nervous Nellie attitude, yet Alex’s fears soon become well-founded. When the
driver swerves to avoid hitting a group of surfers walking on the road, the bus
goes rolling down a cliff in a spectacular stunt shot--but not before all the
passengers manage to climb out safely. Alex meets Pru (engagingly played by Melissa George) an
Australian pack backer with plenty of experience with traveling abroad.
Thanks
to Pru’s translating of the local Portuguese, their little group--which now
includes Brit brothers Liam and Fin (Desmond Askew and Max Brown)--find out that
the next bus won’t be by for a very long while. Discovering a secluded bar on a beautiful beach, the turistas decide to forget
the bus and party hard right into the night. Yet they wake up with more than
just a bad hangover on the beach the next morning: they had been drugged and
robbed of all of their possessions, even their clothes and shoes. Trying to get
help in the local town turns out to be a disaster, and they’re
saved from an angry mob by Kiko (Agles Stieb) a local whom Pru, Alex and Bea met
on the beach yesterday. Kiko leads them to a deserted house that’s
nestled so deep in the jungles, there’s no road leading to it. The turistas find shelter, food, and even clothes--as
well as several dozen passports that had been tucked away in a desk, with no
sign of their owners. But Alex, Pru, Bea and the others soon find out the hard way
what happened to the house’s previous visitors.
After directing Blue Crush, Into The Blue, and now Turistas, director John
Stockwell has become a master of making films about scantily-clad, hard-bodied
young folks in trouble. Where Jessica Alba and Ashley Scott spent the better
part of Into The Blue’s running time in bikinis, now it’s Melissa George, Olivia
Wilde and Beau Garrett’s turn to frolic in revealing swimwear that leaves little
to the imagination for a large part of Turistas. Yet while Stockwell may know
what turns (horny male) viewers on, he also doesn’t skimp on the tension and
excitement--which Turistas has plenty of. Despite the hand-wringing in some
of the main-stream reviews, which decried the film as being a bloody, horrid
Hostel wannabe, Turistas is actually a pretty mild horror film, per se.
Sure, there’s an extremely gory sequence with a woman having her organs removed while still
awake (which stretches credibility to the breaking point, thanks to a leering,
over the top villain who all but twirls his mustache and laugh maniacally during
the procedure), but Turistas is mainly a cat and mouse chase thriller, with the
occasional gory moment, and it’s really
not as bad a film as some folks would have you believe. Stockwell keeps things visually
interesting with a chase through an underwater cave system, and while Josh
Duhamel, Melissa George
and Olivia Wilde are very good, Desmond Askew and Max Brown
steal their brief scenes as the party boys who’re constantly looking for a good
time. And the film’s real-life Brazilian locales are startling to behold. If you’re looking for the stomach-churning horrors of Hostel, you’ll
be disappointed here, but if you’re in the market for a scary thriller with a
more mild horror twist, then try out Turistas. --SF
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