John Stockwell’s Turistas is the epitome of the standard horror film. Aside from the rote facets of the production, its plagiarism is subsequently counterbalanced when the director almost posits something of interest as he heavy-handedly delivers political commentary before concluding upon more of the same. In short, “ho-hum” defines the film.
While on a bus traveling through Northern Brazil, American sightseers Alex Trubituan (Josh Duhamel), his sister, Brea (Olivia Wilde), and their friend, Amy Harrington (Beau Garrett) befriend other foreign tourists, Pru Stagler (Melissa George), Finn Davies (Desmond Askew), and Liam Kuller (Max Brown). When the vehicle descends off a cliff, the passengers narrowly making their escape, the day-trippers opt to wait out the next transport by retreating to a nearby beach resort. That night, all are drugged and mugged. The next morning, as the victims attempt to allocate local police, they meet a native named Kiko (Angles Steib), who offers them refuge in the nearby jungle via his uncle’s isolated estate. However, once the group realizes there are no roads leading to the sanctuary, it is too late to retread the 10-hour trail back to the accident site.
Turistas opens very promisingly as Stockwell fashions a very tension-filled, anxiety driven scenario by which a manic bus driver (Jorge Só) teeters on the bring of death at every turn, pebbles stumbling over each barely bypassed cliff edge as we are subsequently thrust along, before the inevitable occurs: horror cliché. Each figure of the collective bares the stunning stereotyped trademark which makes every defender of the genre shake his or her head in shame. However, Stockwell’s lack of tack becomes ironic for, as the film progresses, we lose track of who is doing what as the barely fleshed out characters are veiled by rain, muck, and nightfall while our only signifiers as to whom is acting or speaking are the weapons which the individuals are brandishing. Of course, by the time one discerns through the darkness and poor editing that a machete is in our midst, such information is, more often than not, arbitrary.
And moot for that matter. It is not infrequent that horror fans are given a handful of characters whom we are not given to care about. Yet Stockwell one-ups the rote horror flick by presenting us with morally-questionable, not antagonists, but characters all around. Potentially interesting is the fact that our villain, one Doctor Zamora (Miguel Lunardi), can be argued to be the only person with an ethical agenda other than hedonism but, after the director uses him as a mouthpiece to express his Marxist discontent of the consequences of American imperialism, we are left apathetically sighing as we are forced to return to the void of character development once again.
To make matters worse, genre formula is seconded only by cinematic plagiarism in Turistas. As dumb tourists who find themselves haplessly stranded (Greg Mclean’s Wolf Creek) gives way to claustrophobic (underwater) cave explorations (Neil Marshall’s The Descent) before segueing to a less-than-desirable black market scenario (Eli Roth’s Hostel), the only thing worth pondering in the wake of substance is the claim that the film irreparably damages the Brazilian tourist trade.
Yet, like the whole of the film, this is easily dismissed because anyone who takes any heed whatsoever of a feature wherein tattoos mysteriously disappear before haphazardly reappearing, the order of “Coke” translates into “beer,” and people intuitively know one another’s names, shouldn’t be allowed in public, no less abroad. Thus, such a statement is analogous to being overly concerned by the presence of a four year-old with a plastic knife. In short, if people still get wet after Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, individuals aren’t unduly odoriferous despite Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, vegetarianism isn’t the majority lifestyle given Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, campers are leaving the woods refreshed instead of D.O.A. in lieu of Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project, and guys are still eyeing women with accents with Eli Roth’s Hostel in their DVD collection, I severely doubt there is any threat of a serious, or even noticeable for that matter, decrease in South American vacations in the upcoming year as a consequence of Turistas. Uncooth, maybe, but “damaging” is not a readily applicable term for John Stockwell’s nature documentary-turned-horror film which, if it did not house the arbitrary storyline, would have undoubtedly made, not only more money, but for a more satisfactory cinematic experience.
-Egregious Gurnow
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- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
