Reviews
‘Turistas’ Review: A Beyond Frustrating And Confounding Film
One talking point of horror that has always been true is that horror was, is, and always will be political. It doesn’t matter what Damien Leone says. Horror is a home for the weird, the lost, the underrepresented; it’s a safe space of controlled aggression and hopefulness. It’s no argument that horror ebbs and flows with the political landscape; New French Extremity is a major example of this. Another fascinating example of this is the ultra-mean slashers of the mid-aughts and the uptick of zombie films post-9/11. Xenophobia cornered the genre into a reaction of fear. Instead of attacking our concerns head-on, horror tucked its tail and gave in to fear. A perfect example of [American] horror’s weird reaction to the post-9/11 “fear of outsiders” is 2006’s Turistas.
What Is Turistas (2006) About?
Alex (Josh Duhamel), Bea (Olivia Wilde), and Amy (Beau Garrett) are backpacking through Brazil. They make some new friends on a bus that’s set to take them to their next location, that is, until the bus crashes. Along the way, they make a couple (white) friends who join them in having drinks at a beachside bar until the next bus comes. Drinks and fun times abound, and the locals seem to welcome them in with open arms. But one by one, the tourists get groggy and pass out. Many of them wake up with all of their items missing, and those are the lucky ones. These friends must trek through the dense Brazilian forests to escape a deadly organ trafficking ring. Who can they trust, and who will make it out with their kidneys intact?!
Where It Succeeds: Practical Effects and Cinematography
Where do you start with a film like this? The pull quote on the front cover of the DVD states, “A better and scarier film than Hostel.” That’s a damn lie. Well, mostly. If there is one good thing you can say about Turistas, it’s that the practical effects are great. And the organ trafficking scene is astounding. That could potentially be because they had a real surgeon perform the surgery scene. If IMDb Trivia is to be believed. But if you’re going to have a brutal film about organ trafficking, you need to make the violence harsh and believable. Mike Manzel’s SFX work is astounding and is truly the highlight of Turistas.
One more tip of the hat to Turistas is Enrique Chediak’s cinematography. Chediak has lensed astounding films like 28 Weeks Later, 127 Hours, and the highly underappreciated Europa Report. Filming in dense woodlands can be challenging, and it can get repetitive. Thankfully, Chediak handles it with ease and class by crafting an enthralling juxtaposition between the natural beauty of Brazil and the harsh tone of the story.
Is Turistas Racist? (Yes)
Now it’s time to soapbox.
Turistas feels undeniably racist. Every community of people has a seedier side, and there is no discounting that; European, American, African, Canadian, wherever you’re from. How you handle a film like Turistas is really a tightrope. As stated earlier, this film is understandably compared to Hostel. Whereas Hostel makes all races of people ‘the bad guy’, Turistas focuses solely on Brazil = bad. I work with someone from Brazil who moved to the States shortly after 9/11, and he has recounted the extreme vitriol he was hit with within just a week of living here. He was called a terrorist, as well as other words I don’t even feel comfortable censoring. It’s very disheartening to see a film like Turistas even have a place in horror history.
The overall theme is that Brazil is bad and you’ll get killed if you’re a pretty white person who goes over there. Zamora (Miguel Lunardi), the film’s antagonist, even goes so far as to say he hates the fact that “rich gringos” come and flaunt themselves on his land. So to get back at them, he kidnaps them and uses their organs for HIS people. This is the same talking point that MAGA chuds like Nick Shirley use when making his racist welfare fraud videos.
The Script, the Director, and a $10 Million Mistake
Turistas is written by Michael Arlen Ross (editor of Wrong Turn and writer of the awful 2025 film Locked), and it’s confounding as to how this script even got legs to begin with. At what point did someone read this and think, “yeah, that’s a good idea,”? Some of the backlash was so bad that Josh Duhamel personally apologized to Brazil for his part in the film. Blue Crush director John Stockwell attempts to direct this film, but instead leaves the heavy lifting to cinematographer Enrique Chediak to do the heavy lifting.
Skip Turistas, Watch Hostel Instead
While there are some great kills and brutal SFX work, Turistas is a film that got a budget that other films deserved. It’s a 10 million dollar middle finger to a wonderful group of people and leans into the “fear of the outsiders”. Thankfully, there aren’t too many overtly racist horror films (tropes, yes), but Turistas is a genuinely awful, racist, waste of time that should have died with its 19% Rotten Tomatoes rating. Do yourself a favor: watch Hostel instead. I can’t believe I’m recommending an Eli Roth film, but I would watch 50 Eli Roth films before watching Turistas one more time.
I was browsing the Arrow Video table at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival in 2024, spending way too much money. (Nearly $400!) One film really caught my eye. Its cover was unassuming but spoke loudly: two red-lit people in space suits on the top left, while a (what seemed to be) missile silo took up the rest of the cover. The cover was enough to sell me, and I threw it in my car. Little did I know that The Andromeda Strain was going to be one of the most fascinating films I have ever watched. And the book was just as spectacular.
What is The Andromeda Strain About?
Piedmont, New Mexico, is quickly thrust into chaos when a government satellite crashes into the town of 68 people. Doctors Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill), Charles Dutton (David Wayne), Mark Hull (James Olson), and Ruth Leavitt (Kate Reid) are activated to investigate this local extinction event. But they don’t find themselves inside a normal science lab; the four doctors are sent to Wildfire, a deep underground military base (D.U.M.B.). This 5-level-deep base is our nation’s frontline defense against this cataclysmic incident, but should it escape, then all hell would break loose.
Adapting Michael Crichton’s Novel
Based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name, The Andromeda Strain is a wonderfully contained film that’s as pulse-pounding as it is fascinating. As someone who isn’t very smart, a film (and book) like this one makes me feel educated. Sci-Fi films find themselves constantly tiptoeing a tightrope of understanding. Hell, science is in its name. Should a writer make the science aspects too dumb, either no one will believe it, or people will be bored. If a writer makes it too smart, you alienate audiences like me, whose eyes quickly gloss over.
Nelson Gidding’s script, which is fairly accurate to Crichton’s novel, does an incredible job of bringing Crichton’s fascinating novel to life. Gidding trims out some fat where needed, turning this story into an incredibly lean two-hour 10-minute self-contained epic. With stylistic assistance from director Robert Wise, Gidding keeps the near-epistolary feel of the novel. But it’s the pacing and stylization of the film that bring it to a new level.
Robert Wise’s Direction and the Film’s Unique Sci-Fi Style
Robert Wise and cinematographer Richard H. Kline bring forced monotony in the most engaging way. I love how the decontamination chapters are handled in the novel, though it could be worrying to question how that could be transcribed over to film. But it’s how the decontamination scenes are handled that adds substance to the style. These scenes are slow, tiring, and should bring the pacing to a complete stop. At this point, we’ve seen what this satellite did to the town, and we’re amped to get more context. These scenes seem to go on and on, and it’s the tedium that comes with them that humanizes the entire process. I’m sure these doctors want to get to the heart of why they’re here, and as viewers, we’re forced alongside them to sit and wait for each second to tick by through the cleaning process on EACH level.
Most of the characters are fodder for dialogue and plot advancements, but it’s the characters of Dr. Hall and Dr. Leavitt who are the most complex. Dr. Hall is trusted with the key that would detonate a nuclear bomb inside this D.U.M.B., due to what is described as the odd-man hypothesis. (This basically means, should the crap really hit the fan, a single man with no children would have the least amount of issues making a tough decision in a life-or-death scenario.) And Dr. Leavitt’s character is maddeningly deep. She suffers from a medical issue that goes undisclosed–this is due to her deep love for her work, and she would not be able to do what she does based on this issue.
The Underground Base and Production Design
But what really sells me on this film is how it all takes place in a gorgeously constructed underground military base. The set design is beyond immaculate and well-crafted. It truly feels like an authentic underground base. And it’s fascinating that I stumbled on this film at the same time I had been doing deep research into Valiant Thor, Raven Rock, and the Greada Treaty. Though that is neither here nor there.
Why The Andromeda Strain Is Essential Sci-Fi Viewing
The Andromeda Strain is a grounded, but still incredibly smart, Sci-Fact film that brings light to an oft-not-spoken-about aspect of the United States Government. It excels at telling a brilliant, life-changing story while making it palatable for all audiences. This is a film that should be shown over the course of three Fridays in a lazy teacher’s science class. Action, anxiety, and fear abound in The Andromeda Strain. It’s a film that should be on any film viewer’s watchlist.
There are countless subgenres within subgenres for horror, and one that feels underutilized is workplace horror. Unless you’re one of the lucky few, most people wake up at some point during the day, go to work, and then come home. It’s one of the few things in life that’s nearly unavoidable. While there are countless real-life examples of workplace violence, seeing exaggerated forms of it in film can still be fun. When I pitched covering The Belko Experiment for this month, I actually thought I was pitching Joe Lynch’s Mayhem. I soon found out how incorrect I had been, but figured I’d go along with it anyway.
Mike Milch (John Gallagher Jr.) and 79 of his coworkers are locked inside the towering building they come to work in every day in Bogotá, Colombia. They’re given simple instructions: murder two coworkers within the next half hour. When they fail that task, coworkers’ heads start blowing up left and right. When they’re given the next task, kill 30 people in two hours, they take it…a little more seriously.
The Belko Experiment’s Brutal Premise Sets Up High Stakes
Written by James Gunn and directed by Wolf Creek creator Greg McLean, The Belko Experiment is a painfully by-the-numbers film that offers little more than a handful of entertaining kills. Its futile attempts at commentary regarding work/life balance or just how bad “faceless” upper management is fall so flat it’s comical. Nothing like multi-millionaire James Gunn telling me how awful it is to have to work a real job for a living. Great work. And its one-dimensional characters do little more than create a slight sigh of relief when they’re dispatched without regard.
A singular attempt at cleverness is broached from the beginning when we see a colony of ants in an ant farm on someone’s desk. Oh, look at that, these workers are nothing more than mindless ants! But any attempt at following that slightly clever idea is quickly thrown away. At one point, Barry Norris (Tony Goldwyn), the big boss in the office, attempts to group up who should and shouldn’t be killed; who has the most value outside of work. Gunn had the perfect opportunity to make Barry a deep and more sinister antagonist. If Barry had grouped people into sets from most to least profitable for the company, we would have something. It would show that Barry is a forward-thinking villain who is trying to suck up to the people who get paid even MORE than him!
Missed Opportunities for a Smarter Corporate Villain
I’ll do you one better. After all of that, what if the bad guys that Barry recruited to help him cull his subordinates realized they were just pawns in the game of Big Business? So then they attempt to repent by killing Barry in the hopes that they can find a common means of escape from this hell? Why is there zero attempt at making an interesting story other than this shitty, watered-down Battle Royale with people we don’t give a shit about? Instead of anything interesting, we’re just given a group of baddies who try to get into the security office’s gun safe. The only reason we’re slightly scared of the “bad guys” is because they’re bad guys.
The only slightly interesting performances we get are from David Dastmalchian and Adria Arjona, even if it might be a fluke. As someone who is a fan of Greg McLean and the Wolf Creek series, something just felt disconnected about nearly every aspect of The Belko Experiment. I’ve brought it up before that sometimes it’s okay to have a film that doesn’t tell a great story as long as the kills can carry some of the weight. But to say this film has a story is laughable, and that carries over to how flat this film looks.
Skip The Belko Experiment and Watch Mayhem Instead
It’s weird how sour this film left me. When I was watching it, I found myself grimacing at some of the kills. And I didn’t vehemently dislike it as much as this review would suggest. But as I sat there and thought longer, I just couldn’t wrap my head around what anyone sees in this. Mayhem is an all-around better film that tackles this same subject but in a much better way. So if you ever decide to sit down and watch The Belko Experiment, maybe go watch Mayhem on Shudder instead.
