Turistas

There are a hell of a lot of things that Turistas could use more of: original ideas, characters who aren't assholes and coherence. Most of all, though, it could use more tits. Good fucking God, how do you make such a generic exploitation slasher movie on a party beach in Brazil without at least letting us wash down the dogshit with a healthy load of boobs?

You do get to see a couple sets of boobs, briefly, in the beginning, and one more set stiffly sitting on the chest of a dead girl toward the end. To me, dead girl nipples don't count, though, even if she's really just acting dead. Watching this movie is like going to a Hooter's and getting a male waiter. The movie, like Hooter's food, sucks, so it's only legitimate reason to exist is as a nipple delivery system for teenage boys--and older men equally desperate. Turistas gives no other justification for its existence.

Like Saw and Hostel and every shitty sequel they spawn in the raging river of low-expectation horror, Turistas doesn't do much scaring, just a bunch of grossing and a hell of a lot of gritty dim lighting that is used to set the tone when the script can't.

A group of completely interchangeable and unlikable tourists from America, England and Australia get stranded in a remote part of Brazil. They drink and dance at a beach bar until they pass out, then wake up to find all of their belongings stolen. In general, the tourists are assholes, especially the one we're supposed to identify the most with: TV's near-star Josh Duhamel. He's a whiny worry-wart who shits on the locals' feelings with his xenophobia.

The tourists are duped by a local who is working for the psychopathic Bad Guy, a doctor who is giving poor children inoculations the first time we see him. Oh, yeah; good thinking. We'll definitely root for Duhamel's boring-ass, pissy American to escape the compassionate doctor. The local leads the tourists to a remote cabin where they rudely rifle through the drawers, cupboards, drink the hooch and steal what they like while unsuspectingly awaiting their doom.

Their doom is that the doctor plans to harvest their organs to compensate for the Brazilians killed each year to give fat, rich first-world drunkards new livers. He apologizes to them in advance, of course, and says it's nothing personal. His logic is asinine, for sure, but he's the only fucker in the movie with any sort of morality at all. That is, when he's not spouting trite aphorisms to children or stabbing his wayward henchmen in the eyes with skewers.

The first half of the movie is a muddy slog through improbability just to get the tourists to a remote cabin. Gee, hasn't there been one or two horror movies already where young people get stranded in a cabin? What the fuck is the point of starting in Brazil if that's where this thing ends up?

The last half hour of the movie is as confusing as watching porn with identical twins in it. You know, your feelings are all mixed up because you sort of want to see them doing it, but then that's incest so it's creepy, and if they do get it on you start feeling sad for how fucked up their lives must be. There's none of that emotional confusion in Turistas because there is nobody to give a monkey's red dick about. The end is just a jumble because everyone's running around, it's too dark, the escape is incredibly lame, too many people have guns and it's all topped off with fifteen minutes of people swimming underwater with flashlights. What the fuck is a horror-movie director or writer's job if he is going to end up with gunfire? I thought the whole point was for newer and better ways to see people die.

The grand finale is a super-duper-cheesy copout where one of the Tourists tells the doctor's henchman not to kill them because they never hurt him, but the doctor is a meanie. Of course, the henchman kills the doctor. Apparently, in all the time he had been employed as a henchman and killed tourists, it never occurred to the man to get a spine. All he ever needed was a few corny words from a pretty girl to go straight and narrow. Fucking retarded copout bullshit. If a director is going to make us spend all that God damn time sitting through his pretty-blue-light skindiving movies, the least he could do is finish it off with something plausible. And, of course, show us more tits.

Turistas reeks like a turd from the ass of Hostel and Saw. The lighting, the tone and the semi-artsy dingy settings are derivative. The stars are supposed to be good-looking college kids, but they are early-twenties the way the cast Beverly Hills 90210 was in their teens. Receding hairlines give it away. Especially on the ladies. The behavior of all the tourists is interchangeable with the exception of the whiny Duhamel, who never shows any cleverness or wit that makes him worth giving two bits of shit about. Of course, he, the girl he loves and his little sister are the ones to survive. I can't remember or discern how the others die.

Director John Stockwell tries too fucking hard not to insult any culture that might buy tickets. The result is that he makes everyone just about equally dull and unlikable. I got the sense he thought he was making a pretty artsy film, so he didn't have to resort to the usual bump-in-the-night scares. But those would have been welcome texture given the flat, drab story that dribbles out of him like an old man's piss at three a.m.. The movie doesn't build to much, but a sense of dread hangs over the whole thing like smog in the San Fernando Valley. There are no highs from the early party scenes because he washes them out in grim lighting. There are no lows at the end because the story is too busy rushing through the paces of direct-to-video action sequences.

Turistas is dogshit, and I haven't voluntarily eaten dogshit since I was nineteen. By the way, I don't consider eating dogshit because someone says they will give you five bucks if you do to be voluntary. If you want to make me swallow something this foul, come up with the five bucks, or at least show me some boobs. Two Fingers.