Entertainment, Movies - Air Force Times

‘Turistas’: Chiller in the rough

So many mainstream movies today are such packaged, pretested, predictable pap that when you trip over a good one that’s flying into the wind and under the radar, it seems to deliver twice the punch — and leaves you feeling quite pleased that you found it.

“Turistas,” a sweaty little thriller about young, self-absorbed gringos biting off way more than they can chew on a lark to South America, is one such film.

Evoking both “Hostel” and “The Descent,” other recent and similarly rough-edged tales of oblivious and overconfident young people barging into alien environments that soon have them fearing for their lives, “Turistas” grabs your throat early and hangs on tight.

Hunky Alex (Josh Duhamel), his cute sister Bea (Olivia Wilde) and her cuter pal Amy (Beau Garrett) are backpacking through Brazil’s vast wilderness when their bus crashes miles from nowhere.

With the next bus 10 hours off, they hook up with some other English-speakers — Pru (Melissa George), an Australian gal traveling solo, and two Brit pals, Finn (Desmond Askew) and Liam (Max Brown) — and wander down to an idyllic beach that boasts a tiki bar brimming with cold beer and hot jungle juice.

The new friends are soon partying with attractive locals who seem to appear out of thin air. But they wake up the next morning face-down in the sand and realize they were all drugged, the tiki bar is deserted and their belongings — cash, credit cards, passports, backpacks — are gone.

Director John Stockwell, using grainy film stock to impart a down-and-dirty feel, steadily ratchets Michael Ross’ script up the terror scale as the no-longer-friendly locals herd Alex and the others into the clutches of Zamora (Miguel Lunardi), a Brazilian with a severe hatred of Anglos that he expresses in a shockingly fiendish way.

But Zamora isn’t some cartoon monster. In fact, as he works on his first victim, he explains his motivations to the next one, bound and whimpering on a nearby table, in such cool and deliberate fashion that they almost seem to make sense — which, of course, makes them all the more terrifying.

The long climactic sequence is a rush; it starts out deep in the jungle in a driving rainstorm and extends through water-filled caves requiring such lengthy swims that you’ll feel as if your own lungs are being squeezed.

Several times, a character must desperately swim to the cave roof to suck oxygen from small air pockets hiding in the rock crannies — a nifty touch.

The film has only one truly complaint-worthy flaw, but it’s a whopper: The story’s big secret essentially is blown in the first 10 minutes, in the form of a line uttered just after the bus wreck. While it’s casually tossed off, any semiconscious viewer will put things together long before the overt revelations come much later.

Why Ross felt the need to tip his hand like that so early — and why Stockwell let him — is a puzzler. But it’s to their credit that they still manage to jack up your pulse as the movie unfolds.

This is the kind of low-profile, low-budget effort that can easily get lost in the annual holiday crush of bloated and overblown A-list offerings (“Apocalypto,” anyone? Anyone? Bueller?).

That’s a shame, because it has things going for it — creepy premise, taut pacing, perilously exotic locale and good actors whose low-to-nonexistent profiles enhance their believability.

Most important, at a crisp 90 minutes, the film — the first release from 20th Century Fox’s new 17-to-24-year-old division, Fox Atomic — doesn’t overstay its welcome like so many do.

An edgy thriller with a healthy coat of grunge, “Turistas” is the octoplex version of a small diamond in the rough.

3 stars. Rated R for graphic violence and brief nudity. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.