Turistas (2006)

Turistas arrived in 2006 as the inaugural release from Fox Atomic, a studio subsidiary assembled to harvest the disposable income of young people who enjoy watching other young people be cut open. John Stockwell directs a cast of photogenic Western backpackers through a Brazilian bus crash, a drugged beach party, and finally a makeshift operating theater where a physician named Zamora removes their organs for the benefit of the poor. The film was the first American production shot entirely on location in Brazil, a distinction it earned and then spent almost immediately.

Zamora devotes his operating-room monologue to explaining that rich gringos have been extracting Brazilian resources for centuries, and that the ledger is now due. This is the film's lone gesture toward political thought, a villain's rationalization dressed as anti-imperialist critique. Manohla Dargis observed that such pictures hide behind a fig leaf of radical politics. She was correct, though the fig leaf is at least present. Brazilian audiences were less amused, and Josh Duhamel went on The Tonight Show to apologize to the nation. The grievance registers, faintly, as does the eat-the-rich flavor of Zamora's stated motive. It is a thin broth.

What surrounds that broth is standard-issue survival horror. Women scream, get sedated, and get vivisected; one of them does kill an attacker with an arrow, which the film treats as sufficient. The casting is white and Western, with Brazilian performers confined to locals, guides, and armed men. There is no environmental subtext, no body politics beyond the camera's appetite for nubile flesh, no neurodivergent presence, and no engagement with history. The closing scene, in which survivors wait for a plane and advise strangers to fly instead of taking the bus, is the closest thing to a thesis. Take the plane. That is the whole sermon.

Thematic tags: none apply. The film opened at number eight domestically, so it did not reach the top of the chart, and it is an original screenplay rather than an adaptation, a remake, a sequel, a true story, or a superhero vehicle. It won nothing, which is its own kind of classification.

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