Paradise Lost (Turistas)

Paradise Lost
(released as Turistas in North America)

Directed by: John Stockwell
Written by: Michael Ross
93 minutes. Certificate: 18

PARADISE LOST sets out to be a tense thriller involving the fate of a diverse group of young English-speaking backpackers. Whether it succeeds is open to question.
A ramshackle local bus carrying local people and a handful of tourists comes to grief on a winding Cliffside road. The drive and passengers manage to get out before the bus tips over the edge and smashes to bits at the bottom of the cliff.
The backpackers (three Americans, two Britons and an Australian girl) find themselves stranded in a beautiful beachfront area awaiting the next bus – a “mere” three days away.
The Americans are ALEX (Josh Duhamel), his sister BEA (Olivia Wilde), and her best friend AMY (Beau Garrett). The two Brits are FINN (Desmond Askew) and LIAM (Max Brown). The Aussie is PRU (Melissa George), who is able to speak Portuguese..
They befriend one another and try to make the best out of a bad situation at a local beachside bar where they party the night away with a Swedish couple and the locals, especially a friendly young local boy named KIKO (Agles Steib).
On the morning after the night before they awake to discover the Swedes have gone and they’ve been robbed. Things turn ugly with the remaining locals. Kiko then turns up and offers to lead them to his uncle's house in the jungle where they can wait for the next bus. They begin a long, exhausting hike through the jungle with a welcome rest at an amazing swimming hole with caves where they swim and dive in the water. Kiko misjudges a dive and seriously injures himself. The panicking tourists carry the bleeding Kiko the rest of the way to the house to try and save his life.
Here they meet Uncle ZAMORA (Miguel Lunardi) and his band of heavily armed thugs. Zamora locks them up, and proceeds in a gruesome scene to harvest Amy’s liver and kidneys – while she’s still alive – for surgery. If they want to avoid the same fate the remaining tourists have to try to escape through the jungles and underwater caves with Zamora and his men in full pursuit…
This is a thoroughly unpleasant film: a mixture of titillating shots of attractive young girls and boys wearing not very much and close-ups of pain and suffering. The scene where the camera lingered in anatomical detail as Amy’s belly was cut open and her organs slowly removed was unnecessarily graphic and hard to defend.
The film’s ‘message’ was a bit skewed too – a strange mixture of sick liberal self-guilt and distrust of foreigners in poor countries. Hell, Tony Blair, George Bush and Australian PM John Howard are heartless exploitative bastards so sure maybe Amy deserved to have her organs cut from her living body. In Zamora’s words, “I'd take the hearts and even the skin from their lily-white asses if I could... but they don't travel well.” Yes, Amy came from a White English-speaking nation that exploits Brazil and other developing countries. It’s a bit rough on Amy to become in effect the sacrificial lamb for the Western world, but there you go, what do you expect flaunting your wealth and privilege travelling throughout South America while being White, Western, blonde and beautiful? Such provocation!
On the other hand, I can’t see Paradise Lost doing much for the Brazilian tourist board. Bus drivers are reckless to the point of suicidal or homicidal. Those seemingly friendly locals you dance the night away with are just lulling the unwary Gringos into a false sense of security before robbing them of their valuables and luring them into the hands of ruthless organ-harvesters.

North by Northwest

Alfred Hitchcock’s

North by Northwest

Certificate: PG Running time 131 minutes

Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense rarely made a dull film. One of the constant themes of his films was the reaction of ordinary people who fall victim to threatening circumstances. We see this in The Birds, The Man who Knew too much, Rear Window, Foreign Correspondent and most notably in this exciting comedy thriller, North by Northwest.

Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is the victim of mistaken identity. He’s really a shallow advertising executive under his mother’s thumb but he finds himself accosted by a group of burly thugs. They drive him to a magnificent mansion to meet the urbane Lester Townsend (James Mason at his oiliest) a foreign spy who believes him to be an FBI agent called George Kaplan.

Thornhill escapes from a murder bid made to look like an drink-driving car accident. He is unable to convince the police that he’s not a drunk telling lies to save his own skin. He goes to the United Nations building to confront Townsend, only to discover that the real Lester Townsend is not the man who tried to have him killed. Worse still, the real Townsend is stabbed to death in front of him. Thornhill picks up the bloody knife. He looks guilty. He goes on the run from the police and from the killers.

On a train he meets up with the glamorous Eve Kendall ( Eva Marie Saint) who at first helps him to escape from the police but whose true motives are open to question. This leads him to his famous encounter with a crop-duster and a spectacular dénouement on Mount Rushmore.

The story goes that Hitchcock deliberately kept the whole plot from the cast. He wanted them to seem totally bewildered and uncertain about what would happen next. Grant in particular carries the air of someone feeling ‘Oh my goodness, what’s happening to me?’ In this he is supported well by Eva Marie Saint as the mysterious blonde femme fatale and by James Mason in a scene-stealing role as the oily villain Philip Van Damm. A perfect plot from a perfect cast. This film still enthralls with its thrills, chases and humour. The widescreen Warner Brothers DVD release bundles in a 39 minute behind the scenes film of the making of the movie, together with an audio commentary by the screenwriter Ernest Lehman and a selection of trailers.