This Tropical Getaway Is No Vacation
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Some people say the advantage of travel is that it allows one to get outside of oneself. The film “Turistas” takes this stance, too, albeit in its own way. It suggests that leaving home is a good way to end up separated from your organs.
Of course, the backpackers in this sweaty but only mildly disturbing horror flick by the director John Stockwell have no idea that the remote corner of Brazil they’ve traveled to is crawling with murderers, including an evil, scalpel-wielding mastermind. The one cautious member of the group is Alex (Josh Duhamel, aka “Tad Hamilton”), a baseball-capped American who never really wanted to leave the States in the first place. He can’t seem to catch his fellow travelers’ mood of carefree abandon: As the bus they’re in careens down the narrow road, he yells at the driver to slow down, embarrassing his sister Bea (Olivia Wilde) and her friend Amy (Beau Garrett). “You’re such a tourist,” Bea hisses.
The bus crashes, and it turns out her brother was right to be worried after all. This is quickly forgotten, however, once the group — which now includes two British backpackers (Desmond Askew and Max Brown) and a well-traveled Australian (Melissa George), whom the Americans have met among the wreckage — learns there is a place nearby where they can party. After a short hike, they arrive at a gorgeous beach where the people are, like them, young and beautiful, and the booze flows freely. The gringos are thrilled, probably because they recognize the setting from many a Captain Morgan ad, and they celebrate accordingly. A few excerpts from the script (by Michael Arlen Ross) give an idea of what happens next:
“Cachaça, baby!”
“I love Brazil!”
“Wake up. We got robbed.”
“What do you mean there’s no police here?”
“What kind of house has no road?”
It’s not a houseboat (good guess!), but rather an abandoned bungalow deep in the woods that the gringos soon occupy under the misguided impression that they’re fleeing danger rather than heading straight into it. Surely they can detect the ghosts of previous slasher films/fairy tales lingering in the house’s every shadow? Once again, Alex is the only one to take initiative. While the rest of the group gets busy drinking the absent owner’s single malt, Alex does some snooping around. In addition to a Swiss Army knife that he will, it goes without saying, find a use for later, he finds a surfeit of security cameras and foreign passports — but apparently no good reason to share his discoveries with his peers.
It isn’t long before the mad doctor (Miguel Lunardi) and his armed associates show up, tossing their houseguests into metal cages and strapping them to operating tables. It must be said that compared to “Hostel,” in which freewheeling backpackers were creatively disemboweled in Eastern Europe, the treatment visited on these kids is pretty tame. The most egregious violation of human rights is forcing the viewer to watch Ms. Garrett’s (or her body double’s) divinely sculpted abdomen be desecrated by a surgeon’s knife.
The film’s action sequences are frustratingly murky, and the climax contains an absolute howler of a coup de grâce; all in all, though, “Turistas” is a fun slice of exploitation entertainment. And like the recent films “Babel” and “The Last King of Scotland,” it marks the West’s dubious moment in the world, even if its strokes are crude and often contradictory. The underwater sequence near the end (the movie’s best) brings the steadily mounting sense of paranoia to a gasping climax that subsequent politically-correct backpedaling — a brief, belated attempt to remind us that Brazilians are nice people after all — does little to assuage. On the other hand, the film makes sure that the lunatic gringo killer announces his legitimate grievance against privileged Westerners.
That the hero should be the one character with no knowledge of the world outside America seems, in this day and age, positively perverted. On the other hand, “Turistas” manages to find at least a nugget of dark humor in the fear and cluelessness of white youth in the age of terror. Realizing their trip has taken a nasty turn, one of the Brits reminds his mate that Brazil was a bad idea from the start. “I wanted to go to Bali!”