Turistas opens today, and even though I didn't like it very much (the setup's great, but there's entirely too much running and screaming in the dark for my taste; you can check out my full review
here), the film still stands as another interesting entry into what's shaping up to be a new trend in horror movies: Let's call it worst-case-scenario, vacations-from-hell movies. We've seen holiday trips gone bad before, in movies as old
The Most Dangerous Game and
The Naked Prey, and as diverse as
2,000 Maniacs!,
The Beach,
Wolf Creek and the 1979 TV-movie
A Vacation in Hell with Maureen McCormack (Marcia Brady) and Barbara Feldon (Agent 99). But there's a new, interestingly anti-American slant to these more recent movies, as well as an unusual amount of sadism: They positively delight in the spectacle of ugly American tourists getting their comeuppance from locals who've had enough of their bad behavior. Most interestingly of all, the majority are from American directors.
The first — and so far, the best — of the them is obviously
Hostel, Eli Roth's shocker about a trio of American frat types who are lured to a hostel deep in Slovakia with the promise of babes and booze, but who wind up covered in a whole lot of blood, and it's all their own. A big part of this movie's deeply sick fun is watching these obnoxious guys get a bit more than they really deserve. Without giving too much away,
Turistas is also about how the behavior of U.S. tourists — and, by extension, the U.S. as a world power — comes back to bite them in the collective ass.
Turistas suggests that indebted and easily exploited countries like Brazil may find new and very painful ways of making globalization work for them. The kids who come to South America for fun in the sun learn that free trade cuts both ways, and payback can be a real bitch.
I haven't had a chance to check out makeup-effects guru Ryan Nicholson's
Live Feed, which went straight to DVD and sports box art that looks exactly like the
Hostel knockoff it swears it isn't.
Live Feed appears to be about five Western friends visiting China who find themselves trapped inside a squalid porn theater with a mad butcher threatening to turn them into tasty delicacies for Chinese consumption. The early trailers for
Hostel II are already in theaters (you can check it out
here), but I never put too much stock in sequels. I'm holding out for the film version of Scott Smith's recent best-selling novel
The Ruins, in which a group of U.S. tourists are stranded on a Mexican hilltop and become plant food for a vicious, flowered vine (that's right, a vine). In the right hands,
The Ruins could turn out to be the cycle's ne plus ultra. Smith himself drafted the screenplay, and word is that Ben Stiller's production company has bought the rights, but the success of the film will depend entirely on the effects team. If Smith can get someone who can make a plant look scary, they might have a hit on their hands.
Like a lot of people, I believe horror movies can tell us a lot about what's going on within our cultural psyche, particular in times of national turmoil. I would suggest finding a copy of Robin Wood's seminal essay on '70s horror entitled "An Introduction to the American Horror Film" to get a brilliant look at what movies like
Night of the Living Dead and
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre have to say about America during and after Vietnam. I wonder what movies like
Hostel and
Turistas are expressing. The last time I left the U.S. as a tourist was back in February, when we were already three years into the war in Iraq. A number of people kidded me about trying to pass myself off as a Canadian before seriously recommending that I leave my Yankees cap at home. Luckily, no one in Europe seemed to notice — or care — that I was an American: They were far more annoyed by all the German tourists. Now there's a group that deserves a horror cycle all its own.
