Ordinary, exhausted tourists perform feats of breath control and endurance that would put a champion free-diver to shame. ![]() The cinematography is terrific, but the action simply unbelieveable. However, the extended jungle chase and final dust-up with Zamora and his henchmen is well-handled – apart from one long scene where the underwater caves reappear. By the time the backpackers escape and make their bid for freedom the nuts-in-a-vice intensity that the best examples of the genre have just isn’t there. Add to this the fact that the opening scene and several afterwards make clear exactly what their potential fate will be and the result is a serious slackening-off of tension. Only Pru seems like a character with any life outside of the film.Īs their saga unfolds, I for one became increasingly impatient with them. Bea and Amy are vacuous valley girls whose main purpose seems to be to provide bikini and wet T-shirt shots for the Loaded sector of the audience – who might well recognise themselves in Finn and Liam, gormless oiks who see world travel as one long cheap party and fall to bickering and whinging when the hangover comes. Josh comes across as a dumb lug, suspicious and scathing of everything about Brazil. Trouble is, they’re not that nice or sympathetic people. The idea presumably was that here the audience gets to know and sympathise with the characters as people, rather than disposable screams on legs. Scenarios like this work best when hapless protagonists (and the audience) are thrown into a world of pooh without any orientation time. It’s a brave decision of Stockwell’s to give his characters so much space before the fur starts to fly. Despite a running time of barely 90 minutes, this film seems to take an age to get to the point. If this sounds like a lengthy set-up, that’s because it is. And the waiting list’s just been reduced by five… ![]() But on arrival they find out the truth – Kiko has an ulterior motive and uncle Zamora (Miguel Lunardi) is that oft-encountered cinematic amalgam of brilliant surgeon and utter fruitcake.Ĭonvinced that all American tourists are kidnappers intent on using the locals as fodder for cheap and easy organ transplants north of the border, he’s set up his own parallel facility to supply the local hospitals. Having little alternative, they follow him deeper into the jungle, stopping only to clean up by diving into a hidden lagoon with stunning underwater caves. ![]() Staggering into the nearest town, they conduct a masterclass in antagonising the locals and only the intervention of one of the partygoers from the night before, Kiko (Agles Steib), saves them from a lynch mob.įull of apologies, he offers to lead them to his uncle’s hacienda. Sure enough, they alight on a scene straight from the brochures and proceed to drink, dance and flirt the night away.īut the caprihinias come with a Mickey Finn chaser and next morning they wake to find the bar, together with all their worldly goods, has vanished. They strike out together, encouraged by reports of a fabulous beach bar nearby. A bus crash in rural Brazil literally throws together a disparate group of backpackers: buffed jock-type Alex (Josh Duhamel), who is chaperoning his sister Bea (Olivia Wilde) and her shy best friend Amy (Beau Garrett) hippyish Aussie trail veteran Pru (Melissa George) and comic relief Brit beer-and-shag monsters Finn (Desmond Askew) and Liam (Max Brown). Speaking as a confirmed non-devotee (I love horror but Hitchcock could make you shiver with a funny look and even Dario Argento never relied solely on schlock) I was interested to see what Stockwell and debut screenwriter Michael Arlen Ross, both newcomers to the genre, would bring to the party.Īnd the start is a promising slow-burn. Sometimes it seems barely a week goes by without another entry promising even bloodier and more ‘uncompromising’ violence. Since Eli Roth brought a new dimension to the classic horror scenario of young and attractive but not too clever Yanks in peril by cranking the gore factor up to 11 with the likes of Cabin Fever and Hostel, the demand for such ‘in yer face’ existential shockers has mushroomed. Not the best tourist board tagline perhaps but a reasonable summary of director John Stockwell’s well-made yet ultimately unsatisfying foray into the grindhouse genre. Brazil – land of sun, sea, samba and surgery without anaesthetic.
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