Turistas | Blood Diamond | Unaccompanied Minors
Apocalypto | The Holiday

Turistas

You can tell a lot about a movie by its poster. Some are epic, grandiose visions and give a damn good indication that you’re going to get your money’s worth. Some are mysterious, filling you with curiosity—eventually pulling you into a dark theater even though you haven’t the slightest inkling as to what the hell the movie’s even about. But some are just blatantly honest and allow you to… well, judge a book by its cover.

Which brings us to Turistas, a horror movie (I guess) about a bunch of young, vacant, yet conventionally attractive Americans vacationing in Brazil whose internal organs end up on the black market. If you look at the poster for this movie, you’ll see a spooked out/constipated girl with a light in her face and the words GO HOME across her forehead. Let’s think about this a minute. I know the premise and the meaning of the words is for these little sexpots to get the hell out of there and back to the suburbs, but there’s another message here: This movie is shit and you should GO HOME so you’ll save your money.

Horror movies are getting to the point where you can spot a bad one a mile off, the same way you’re at a bar and you can see someone’s neurons misfiring from across the room. There are two camps for horror movies: they can either scare the shit out of their audience or gross them out. A good horror movie will try to find a balance between the two—scaring you with what you’re not seeing as well eventually hitting you with something right between the eyes. But Turistas doesn’t do that. It just kind of inundates you with imagery of greasy/sexy people before they get their gizzards ripped out. They’re all pretty dumb and uninteresting and this makes it easier for you to not especially give a shit when they eventually get bumped off.

There is nothing whatsoever that stands out about this movie. Watching Turistas is like getting stood up for a date without a phone call first. It’s like having a dried-out appetizer for dinner. A hangover without the buzz. A ugly date with no personality. In retrospect, I’d have gone with STAY HOME.

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