So like, spoilers I guess?
I tired of the post-Hostel torture porn genre very swiftly, essentially I was over it once Hostel’s end credits rolled. I recognised the film was efficient at what it did, just didn’t see the value it added to the world.
Of course among horror fans I was the minority, and torture porn became an actual profitable thing for a few years.
So I missed Turistas when it was first released. Now nearly a decade on only a dearth of anything semi-decent of late convinced me to give it a chance, and while the content of Turistas is impossible to like, I can’t argue that it does its thing efficiently enough.
The film follows a bunch of adventurous backpackers of many nations as they attempt to squeeze every ounce of teenage enjoyment from a debaucherous trip through Brazil’s least known holiday destinations. Some are maxing the time available until college, some sowing the oats, some likely spending the parent’s dosh. All are toned, tanned and tedious. Only Melissa George’s character seems to have a skerrick of common sense and a single useful skill beyond filling a bikini (which she does too!) being fluency in Spanish, the native tongue of the land.
When a transport breakdown leads to them finding an out of way unspoilt and undiscovered paradise, which leads to an all night beach party, which leads to waking up with monumental hangovers, a sense of confusion and an absence of money, luggage, identification and transport.
It couldn’t get worse… could it? Anyone can get drugged and robbed. But at least we have all of our vital organs and that American sense of entitlement. No-one can take that from us…
The group find confidence and unity in being outsiders, they decide as long as they remain together that all will be OK. This despite the already known fact that only one of them has any trace of ability. This is just the first bad decision of many. Over the next cinematic hour it seems that the group are taking a field course with a double major in making bad decisions and overlooking obvious warning signs.
Turistas is like Kanye West’s driveway. It’s a long journey through beautiful terrain to a place where nothing good ever comes.
By the time the kids roll up at the house in the middle of the jungle they might as well have drawn straws to see which ones would lie down, play dead and save whoever else the trouble. But that would defeat the purpose of all the clumsy and often blatant foreshadowing that the kids had to that stage opted to ignore.
There is really only one scene that will have you squirming (almost guaranteed), and the build up and post scene action never scales any great heights, but with some violence, gore, nudity and suspense, it’s hard to imagine Turistas being better than it ends up.
Final Rating – 6.5 / 10. It’s still entirely unnecessary, but a great example that torture porn can be reasonably effective.
