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.