Pop quiz, Hotshot. You and your buddies have been chased out of a village in Brazil. After wandering through the jungle, you come across a large house with plenty of food, medications prescribed to different people in different countries in the medicine cabinet, a video surveillance set up and a drawer full of passports, thereby implying that those who held the passports never left the country. Do you…
A) Get the fuck out of there.
B) Tell your buddies about this so ALL of you can get the fuck out of there.
C) Stand there like a complete Gomer and go about your day.
If you picked C then TURISTAS is for you, but this site isn’t… Seriously, you’re a retard and we don’t want you here. We only accept the best here at horroryearbook.
TURISTAS is the movie many were afraid HOSTEL was gonna be. Straight up xenophobia and misogyny without a brain in its head. Where does the plot of a horror movie end and Darwinism begin? The natural order dictates these people must–MUST–die. No wonder the Brazilian locals are pissed at our heroes. One of them beaned an eight-year-old with a rock. These characters are not cut out to chew solid food, let alone navigate hostile territory. It’s like dropping a fat guy into Darfur just to see how long he lasts.
The plot is your standard torture porn-fare: Six people vacation in Brazil and are stranded by a bus crash. Their stuff is stolen and they deal with all this misfortune in a novel way: Drinking, acting like complete tools and grab-assing on the beach. A couple of the girls even trade clothing on the beach which, as we know, HAPPENS ALL THE FUCKING TIME! You know when a woman asks a man “Do you mind if I go topless?” Yeah, half past fucking never.
So these people catch the attention of a Doctor named Zamora, who abducts tourists and relieves them of their organs for sale on the black market. The only good scene in TURISTAS is when he’s operating on one of them and tells her all about how the liver he’s ripping out of her is gonna go to some poor impoverished kid who isn’t gonna Appletini and Jager-Bomb it away.
And Zamora’s the bad guy? If I were given the option of yanking the innards out of obnoxious tourists and giving them to those who actually, ya know, NEED them? I’d jump on it in even less than a heartbeat. Where do I get my scrubs?
You may notice that I left out most of the characters’ names and who played them. It’s because I don’t care. The movie didn’t give me an incentive to find out. I know one of them is Josh Duhamel, most commonly known as the guy who is shtupping Fergie from Black Eyed Peas…. My condolences to him and his family. And one of the women is played by someone named Melissa George. The name sounds familiar, but I’m not looking it up. That means the movie won and I lost.
But as I said, TURISTAS is torture-porn. This kind of movie came to vanguard in the Hooper-Craven splash of the early seventies, and I bet they have their heads in their hands now. Do you know what the difference is between a movie like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT or THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and something like TURISTAS? The former actually made attempts to be scary. TURISTAS and its water-headed ilk are nothing more than lazy and defeatist. “Well, we can’t actually SCARE people, so we’ll just try to make them as uncomfortable as humanly possible.” I’m getting sick of these damn things. I’m all for watching people die on film, but for Christ’s sake make it fun.
But even by the basement-low Torture-Porn standards, TURISTAS blows. How extreme and in-your-face can a movie be when the villain uses fucking ANESTHESIA?
In fact I’ll even go so far as to say that, with the exception of some good underwater photography, TURISTAS is about as useless and meaningless as a “World’s Greatest Mom” mug at Britney Spears’ house. But there is one question many of you have. On that if answered in the right way will make you disregard every bad thing I said about this movie and send you running for the Netflix queue…
Yes. There are boobs in TURISTAS.
You have now officially revealed yourself as not man enough for real porn.
Bra-Fucking-Vo, fellas.
1 out of 4
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