TURISTAS: DVD

SYNOPSIS:
When a maniac bus driver on a beautiful coastal road in Brazil loses control, the attractive young tourists on board jump off just before the bus tumbles down the cliff. Not far away is a beach bar, though, where the much relieved youngsters get into serious Brazilian beach fun. But when they wake up drugged and robbed, their holiday begins to turn into a deadly adventure in which they become targets for a Brazilian surgeon's organ transplant business on the black market.

Review by Andrew L. Urban:
Pulled from its cinema release, Turistas makes fair DVD fodder for a night of pizza and beer amongst friends (young males) without demanding too much digestion. Especially the first half of the film, with its exotic Brazilian locations, teeny weeny bikini clad babes and a sense of foreboding that John Stockwell builds cleverly. Everything is set for the horror to begin, but the screenplay veers off into a muddle and the most dramatic, tense scenes of the film are shot at night in the dark jungle.

But there are wonderful scenes on the way, including a waterfall adventure and some underwater sequences inside a cave system. After all, this is the John Stockwell who made Blue Crush and Into the Blue; he knows water for film. However, the same underwater caves are the setting for the escape scenes, which are so confusing - shot in virtual darkness and on hand held camera to boot - as to be irritating and boring.

Australian actress Melissa George comes equipped with Portuguese and does a great job as a level headed young traveller, as do all the cast. And the writers have given the organ thieving doctor a more complicated motivation then mere greed: he's fed up with gringos taking everything they want from his country, even organs for their sick, rich relatives. So his mission is to take the organs from turistas and sell these back to the gringos ... while this rightousness fails to make the film gripping, at least it isn't totally inane.

Published August 30, 2007