Just looking at the trailer for Turistas you'd be apt to think it was just lower-budgeted riff on Eli Roth's Hostel only set in Brazil as a bunch of partying twenty-something's have their organs gorily removed. But looks can truly be deceiving as this is less a horror movie than a mediocre "loosely rooted in reality" thriller that's so dull and, for the most part, uneventful it's hard to picture just who the audience for this is.

Off the bat the movie seems more concerned in being a travel guide of Brazil with young, generally in shape travelers (the girls are a bit too "in shape" as they're mostly gaunt and way too skinny - their poking out ribs is the scariest thing here) taking a bus across the jungle-like countryside. Things soon turn wrong though as the bus crashes, leaving all the passengers stranded for at least ten hours.

Alex (Josh Duhamel from TV's Las Vegas) and sister Bea (Olivia Wilde) happen to be on the bus and end-up befriending some of their fellow travelers (a who's-who guide of clichés with Bea's best friend, two horny Londonite pals, and the world-wise Australian trekker). Rather than stick around and wait they learn of a beach side bar and head-off there in search of sun and fun.

Soon enough they're drinking up a storm, having quick sex with the locals, and forgetting all about their transportation troubles - only to wake up in the morning robbed of all their possessions in the middle of nowhere.

From here Turistas tries to set-up a "Vacation from Hell" twisty plot as our group falls victim to a gang of locals, led by a mean-tempered doctor (Miguel Lunardi), who kidnap them and proceed to attempt to harvest their organs to transplant them into fellow locals in need (it's the transplant angle that gives the movie it's only real "grue" scene as Lunardi's character performs surgery on one character while explaining his slender motivation for everything: that rich "gringos" have been stealing their organs for years).

The main problem with Turistas isn't writer-turned-filmmaker John Stockwell's direction or the fairly young cast, in fact they're both quite competent, the biggest drawback here is Michael Arlen Ross' script which takes an idea that could've been a compelling one and does nothing with it. The movie doesn't even gain any momentum until the last half-hour and by then you really won't care. Characters constantly do dumb things, the baddies are never fleshed-out at all, and the finale (set in some underground caves we see earlier in the movie) is filmed so chaotically and tight-angled that we're never really sure just what the Hell is going on.

There's just nothing here to draw the viewer in, and even the aforementioned surgery scene (which felt tacked-on to me) and a few okay attempts at suspense, can't lull one out of the coma this uninteresting bore puts you in. And that's too bad as this'll just go down as yet another forgettable attempt to make a horror-thriller rather than a movie that takes a standard premise and does something new with it. (Chris Hartley, 12/3/06)

Directed By: John Stockwell.
Written By: Michael Arlen Ross.

Starring: Josh Duhamel, Melissa George, Olivia Wilde, Desmond Askew.