Movie Review: Turistas
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What Parents Should Know
Parents need to know that this torturous (literally and
figuratively) horror movie is absolutely not for kids. It's
full of gross-out violence -- the sort characterized by yucky
wounds and bloody body parts. Violent acts include a stick in
the eye, a hook in a foot, shooting, knifing, and surgery
(depicted here as sadistic). The insidious motive for the
murders is organ harvesting, described in some detail as a
problem of class/nation inequities and depicted brutally.
Characters engage in reckless sexual pursuits, though the one
couple who actually have sex (off camera) use a condom.
Characters drink, smoke cigarettes and pot, and are drugged by
murderous villains. Language is pretty much incessant,
including repetitive uses of "f--k."
Families can discuss the carelessness of the privileged tourists, whose callous treatment of non-English-speaking people and ignorance of local customs marks them as somehow "deserving" of punishment. Do you think this a realistic portrayal of how some travelers act? What point is the movie trying to make beneath all of the bloodshed? What attitude should you take when visiting other countries and cultures?
Common Sense Media Review
The so-called Third World wreaks vengeance on a bevy of
beautiful Caucasians in TURISTAS. The jokey-but-not-so-funny
warning against traipsing into unfamiliar territory is explicit
enough in the movie's tagline ("Go Home"), but
John
Stockwell's torture-as-horror flick offers still more
persuasion.
First, the American, British, and Australian tourists ride a bus that takes a plunge off a mountain road in Brazil. Escaping with only some scattered luggage, they decide to entertain themselves while awaiting replacement transportation by drinking the night away with youthful, energetic locals who appear eager to party, have sex, and learn English.
It's not long before the tourists -- including Alex ( Josh Duhamel), his sister Bea (Olivia Wilde), and his potential romantic interest Pru ( Melissa George), as well as the British lads Finn (Desmond Askew) and Liam (Max Brown) -- run headlong into wholly predictable plot. They're drugged, robbed, and apparently incapable of calling home or American Express for help, and so they end up dependent on those same locals for help.
Of these, Kiko (Agles Steib) appears the most sincere: He offers the group his uncle's swank house atop a jungly mountain. Little do they know, but that very uncle, psychopathic Dr. Zamora (Miguel Lunardi), intends to harvest their organs. It's helpful and silly that he explains his thinking on the issue while digging into a pretty girl's torso for her liver and kidneys (essentially, he's angry at American imperialism and arrogance and wants to see a Yankee heart beating in the chest of an ailing Brazilian child). His villainy is underscored repeatedly: He puts a kabob stick through a follower's eye, murders his minions when they misbehave, and keeps passports of past victims, for no fathomable reason except to grant the newest ones the chance to discover them and be suddenly afraid.
While it's short on clever scares and long on bloody excess (machetes and scalpels being implements of choice), Turistas also lurches between images that are breathtakingly beautiful (think Blue Lagoon) and literally hard to see, as when a tattooed thug chases victims through dark underground caverns, swimming for long minutes underwater. And the fact that the doctor's own viciously verbalized racism leads directly to his downfall doesn't exactly make up for the film's demonizing of dark-skinned characters throughout.
Fans will likely have already seen other gruesome torture films like Hostel and Saw . Another similarly dark, watery movie is The Cave . For a serious consideration of black market organ harvesting, see the excellent Dirty Pretty Things. And for a movie about more entitled tourists running amok, try The Beach.
Common Sense Media is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing information to help parents make media and entertainment choices for their families.
