Reviewed by Cassady on Mon January 15, 2007

Maybe if a gore-horror hit called Hostel hadn’t told a very similar story a year previous, Turistas might have had some juice, instead of feeling like a squeezed-out mango of a would-be suspense shocker.

Setting, unlike Hostel’s Eastern European nation of Slovakia, is the Brazilian boondocks, where swarms of international tourists, mostly well-off, white collegiate types, go for sun, sin, drinking and dope, usually over spring break. We meet a busload of these natural-born victims, played by little-known and lesser-body-fat actors, at the outset when their vehicle overturns.

Escaping – and making no friends among the surly, Portugese-speaking villagers with their camera-clicking and their attitudes – the youths find an oasis of a beachside bar. After a rave-like party, they awake to find that they've all been drugged and robbed of everything but the skimpy clothes on their backs. And two of them are missing, their belongings showing up among the mongrel packs of hostile locals, only one of which befriends the foreigners, in an obvious setup. Things are going to get really nasty, as we’ve been tipped off by the closeups of blood-spattered surgical instruments that opened the piece.

There’s a potentially good idea here, derivative as it is of Hostel (and the Australian bloodbath Wolf Creek) insofar as you can already point to South America as a source of urban legends and terrible reports about jungle kidnappings, death squads in the slums of Rio, rampant corruption and burning Third-World resentment against indolent, holidaying yankees. Still, after an adequate build-up, Turistas conks out, with sicko vivisections; a tedious chase scene that’s mostly set underwater and in the dark; and characters whose motivations and personalities change abruptly to steer the plot along its tedious (ultimately unsurprising) course.

Ultimately you get the impression that even the filmmakers want to wrap the thing up quickly and get a paycheck; at least Hostel kept you watching (if you could stomach the torture-mutilations). Question remains, what did poor Slovakia do to get the bad publicity?