In keeping with its parade of medical horrors, Turistas is a leaky colostomy bag of a movie—the kind of by-the-numbers gut-spelunking that gives torture porn a bad name. Calling the movie “Hostel Goes Brazilian” isn’t just an indication of its gore level (which is more bark than bite, with one sickening exception) but of its ideological confusion: once again, the victims are wandering Americans preyed upon by foreign undesirables, whose grisly extremes are partially the result of the actions of uglier Americans—the sick’uns coming home to roost.
Here, the prey are vacationers detoured by a bus accident into a tropical paradise of white sand, cheap fruity drinks and suspiciously friendly exotic babes. One bad hangover later, backpackers Josh Duhamel, Melissa George and Olivia Wilde and their expendable cohorts are being chased through a favela—with worse awaiting in the jungle torture chamber of a mad doctor, who’s eager for retribution against wealthy gringos harvesting the organs of the local poor. His rationale seems like a sop to audiences outside America, who otherwise might misconstrue his leering bloodlust, and the laughable shiftiness of the other dark-skinned foreigners, as racism.
If a movie is going to be this blatantly xenophobic—Brazil should hire whichever crisis manager had to handle Georgia’s tourism industry after Deliverance—it might as well go completely over the top into taboo territory, right where Hostel lives. But the director, John Stockwell, pads the movie with what seems like real-time hikes and cave swims, which at least postpone the inevitable money shot of the surgeon bobbing for kidneys. Close-ups of widened eyes are meant to fill us with—what? Sympathetic terror? Queasy anticipation? Reminders to pick up Visine on the way home? Take the advice of Turistas’ tagline: “Go home.”
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