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The “turistas” referred to in the title of the movie are a group of young vacationing tourists composed of American brother and sister Alex (Josh Duhamel) and Bea (Olivia Wilde) and Bea’s friend Amy (Beau Garrett), Australian Pru (Melissa George) and British Finn (Desmond Askew) and Liam (Max Brown). While on their way to their next tour stop, their bus crashes and they find themselves marooned for the next eight hours. After getting into trouble with Brazilian fellow passengers, the group decides to pass time at a beachfront bar they discover while exploring the area. Settling down to enjoy the hospitality of the locals, they all agree to just take it easy, forget about catching the next bus and party through the night., all in wild abandon, emboldened by sexy dancing, spiked exotic drinks and casual sexual encounters. Their one-night paradise turns ugly the next day when they wake up to find themselves robbed of everything they’ve got. They hike to the nearest town on foot, where a local they befriended the night before, Kiko (Agles Steib) draws them away from the ire of unfriendly locals and leads them through the jungle to the relative safety of a scenic pool with waterfalls and hidden caves. For a while they forget their predicament and do not even suspect they are in for a far worse fate. They arrive at a remote cabin deep in the jungle , which turns out to be the base of operations of Zamora (Miguel Lunardi), a doctor who happens to hate “gringos” and is engaged in the very lucrative business of harvesting the internal organs of unsuspecting Western tourists who get “stranded” in that side of town. The trapped tourists are promptly captured and caged by Zamora’s gang of local thugs and suddenly they are faced with the horrors of being unwilling organ-donors.
There is hardly anything entertaining or thrilling about Turistas, save perhaps the underwater cave scenes that make one marvel at the natural wonders of the Brazilian jungle and some suspense generated when these caves become the setting for the final chase and confrontation scenes. The plot is thin and formulaic and hardly justifies the presence of objectionable content: intense and gratuitous violence, including eye-poking with a barbecue stick and a graphic surgical procedure with all the blood and gore; nudity; suggestive dancing, sexual humor, rough and crude language.
One might find a big sick and cruel joke in the scene where Zamora lectures his victims on his efforts to even the equation between globally unequal nations while going about his gory task of surgically separating the internal organs of the drugged and hardly-conscious “donor” from the rest of her body. Still, for the purpose of some rude awakening especially on the very real issue of human organ trafficking, which should be of great concern for all humanitarian organizations and governments alike, this film could be used as a discussion-starter or a group reflection piece. Everyone should be made aware that organ-harvesting (masquerading as organ-donation) is an evil already existing as an illicit trade in our midst, and that there are now cases where “donors” sell their internal organs to syndicates in order to alleviate their poverty or support their vices. But one need not be poor to be victimized by organ-harvesters--as Turistas demonstrates, even a rich but aimless crowd can be easy prey. Beware.
(Date Reviewed: 23 March 2007)
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