Partying around a seaside bar in Brazil, the hero of “Turistas” is careful to order his cola without ice. Wouldn’t want to catch a germ.
Ah, those innocent days of “Don’t drink the water.” Now, in the era of “Hostel” and “Cabin Fever,” globe-hopping backpackers are more likely to be tortured and disemboweled by lunatics than sickened by a microbe.
“Turistas” tries to join the current wave of “Saw”-level mayhem, but it comes up short in every way. It doesn’t rise above the grisly standard of those movies, and it can’t match their zest for explicit gore.
A tourist bus goes off a cliff in a remote Brazilian coastal area. Everybody survives, and some of the young turistas decide to hike down to the aforementioned beach bar. Bad things will happen.
First, they are drugged and robbed. Then they wake up, hike halfway through the rain forest, and are lured into the lair of a fiendish (but politically motivated) doctor who plans to harvest their organs.
Why didn’t the fiendish doctor harvest their organs while they were originally drugged? This and other questions arise during this nonsensical movie.
Director John Stockwell may have had a parable in mind about clueless people blundering into a foreign place they don’t even try to understand, but the result is mindless. And then there’s the underwater cavern, which seems to be imported from “The Descent” (the year’s best horror movie).
Maybe the cavern exists so Stockwell can photograph nubile bodies under water, something he did in the inane “Into the Blue” and the somewhat better “Blue Crush.” He certainly has a talent for getting young talent to wear as little as possible.
Likable Josh Duhamel leads the cast, with Melissa George (who was on “Alias” for a while), Olivia Wilde and Beau Garrett filling out the bikinis. (Beau is a woman, in case you’re puzzled.) Desmond Askew provides comic relief as a beer-happy Englishman.
Stockwell tries to get gruesome, but you can tell his heart isn’t in it. There’s a liver, though, and a couple of kidneys, in a surgical sequence that provides most of the film’s squirm-worthy moments.
The government of Brazil should be about as happy with “Turistas” as Kazakhstan is about “Borat.” This movie exploits the culture’s free-floating fear of foreign places, but without having anything interesting to say about it.
Olivia Wilde, Melissa George and Josh Duhamel in “Turistas.”
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