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Turistas (2006)
This one comes to us from Fox and is directed by an actor from John Carpenter's "Christine" named John Stockwell. It's clear that if there is a trend in today's horror genre, it's the torture movie. At least it's that or movies that appear to be torture movies. The latter would be the best way to describe this movie. Now, don't get me totally wrong here. There are some gore scenes in the movie, but it's nowhere as brutal as you are led to believe.
Turistas is a film about a group of young travelers that are on a trip in Brazil. During the opening scene the group is riding a bus taking people to their destination. Well one thing leads to another and the bus ends up going over a cliff with all of the passengers narrowly escaping theirdeath. Once this happens the travelers meet up with an Aussie traveler named Pru, and two English travelers named Finn and Liam. They all decide to stick together and decide to check out the area that they are in before getting on the next bus. Upon inspection the group finds a beautiful beach where they decide to hang out for awhile. When they meet a friendly couple on the beach they decide to stay there for awhile and blow off catching their bus. Once they do this they run into a ton of trouble as they realize that the locals were not as nice as they seemed as the group is robbed of all money, passports, and other possessions. At this point the group gets caught up with people in the black market of human organs. So I'm sure you can see what we are getting at here.
As far as the movie itself goes, it's rather disappointing. It was real easy for the story to suck me in as I thought that part was actually the bright spot of the film. During the first 40 minutes or so you find yourself interesting in the direction of the movie. Then it all starts to get to tedious and boring to really care any longer. Just when you think something is about to take off and happen, it doesn't. When you are expecting the film to keep trucking along, something major happens. It's just incredibly uneven and loses all effectiveness because of it. There isn't as much gore as promised, but when they show you is actually pretty good overall. The characters in the film however are incredibly paper thin and indistinguishable throughout the film. The writing was something that certainly left more to be desired, as the movie comes across like it has a pretty complicated plot….and it doesn't at all. Actually the movie does do a good job at hiding the fact that there is very little plot in this one at all. At times during watching the movie I noticed that scenes were way too long (there's a scene at a party, and another underwater scene that I thought dragged WAY too much), and a lot of the movie was just basically filler where it needed drama and suspense. I really had a problem with the lack of tension in the movie and that's where this one really fails. You can guess weather everything is going to be alright or if someone is going to die and the movie comes off flat because of that as well.
The movie did have some stylish sequences, and I'm sure that the shoot had to be complicated because I believe that the movie was shot in Brazil. Also, I was really happy with the lack of MTV editing that Turistas showed. It's something that bothers me a great deal in most Hollywood horror flicks these days, so I was happy that this one seemed to avoid that. Also, the gore that was done in the film was done pretty well, as well as a CGI death scene where someone falls off a cliff.
Overall I would say that Turistas is not worth the buy on DVD, but if you've been itching to check this one out it might be worth a rental. It's certainly no where the worst movie I've seen. Hell, it's not even the worst "Torture" movie that I've seen, so you may want to check it out if you are curious about it.
Rating - **
-Ed Demko
