"Hostel" but in Brazil

"I think this was a bad idea" - Alex,

This is why I fear all people that are different than me.

The movie is Hostel for people too scared to watch Hostel and it's pretty uneven. The build up for the first 45 minutes is actually pretty good with Josh Duhamel, Melissa George and Olivia Wilde grounding a script that is full of intensity and mystery. Once you understand all the stakes of the film it starts to fall really fast with the last 35 minutes being pretty boring, and dark, action sequences.

A decent Hostel rip-off with a much more likable cast (well, with the exception of Desmond Askew) that doesn’t have quite the same punch that Hostel had but still manages to be pretty entertaining.

I love Melissa George and watching Josh Duhamel half naked for most of the movie will never get a complaint from me. The locations are gorgeous, but there’s just something missing from this that made Hostel work better for me. It might just be how pretty the setting is because it doesn’t evoke the same sense of dread as that of a remote European village setting.

Still, a it’s fun 90 minutes and Josh Duhamel so.

These white people were dumb as fuck. And this is coming from a white guy. 🇧🇷

I really have a soft spot for some 00’s horror. There was a huge boom in these grimy, gory vacation-gone-wrong films around 2005 thanks to Hostel and Wolf Creek. 

Turistas was always one of my favorites out of the bunch. It’s not quite as bloody as the others (there’s really only one wtf scene) but it always stood out to me.

It wasn't that bad! But the illogical choices that characters made throughout the movie are very frustrating....

Turistas tells the story of... well, tourists who found themselves the latest victims of an organ-harvesting syndicate.
Following up on the gore craze of the mid-'00s (Hostel, Saw) Turistas unexpectedly went the less sadistic way but it still is pretty gory. While the film is good in building up suspense, it fails to sustain it. Add that to the stretched story and uninspired ending. Granted, the touch of realism used as the film's plot is sensible and the cast gave a decent performance as well.

A freshly squeezed dose of sun-soaked, drink-spiking, bikini-wearing, tourist-killing, tropical carnage with the brain capacity of a coconut but the fun factor of stealing a jet ski and riding off into a tangerine sunset. Aside from the two-dimensional characterisation, some sloppy editing and a terribly-lit underwater sequence that somehow made it into the final cut, John Stockwell’s sliced-in-paradise, anti-travel campaign makes us yearn for the days when the genre was less concerned with using psychological damage to generate scary narratives and was more focused on pumping-out generic slashers just for the sake of seeing pretty people being dissected in foreign locations. And it’s still so refreshing.

Turistas might be bad in the offensive way it portrays Brazil, but it’s not necessarily as unwatchable as its reputation would have you believe. There’s beautiful scenery and so-so performances from Josh Duhamel and Olivia Wilde from before they were really famous or relevant in any way. The first half is an absurdly slow and drawn out lead-up to an absolute clusterfuck second half, and that evens out to a boring and predictable but ultimately easy watch.

MY KIDNEYS ALMOST ENDED UP ON THE BLACK MARKET?!!?! *road trip gone wrong* *REAL* *NOT clickbait!!!*

I was surprised to see Olivia Wilde and Josh Duhamel in a horror film! I am always happy to see Melissa George and would love to see her in more films.

The actual movie was pretty so-so, but not that bad. A head-splitting scene had me wincing and gasping aloud.

Vegan alert:
Ripping people open without their consent.

Vegan alerts/points do not count toward the final score of the film.