"A terrifying adventure thriller that follows a group of young tourists who while backpacking through Brazil discover an unsettling secret lurking deep within in its jungles. The backpackers themselves consist of Alex (JOSH DUHAMEL), his sister Bea (OLIVIA WILDE), her best friend Amy (BEAU GARRETT), an Australian named Pru (MELISSA GEORGE), and two best friend Brits named Finn and Liam (DESMOND ASKEW and MAX BROWN)."
Paradise Lost Movie Review
Holiday makers leave their heart in the Brazilian jungle in this exploitation thriller directed by John Stockwell "You do not need to do this. Oh God, not like this, no!" So pleads the blonde girl, strapped to a bed and encircled by surgical appliances, in the arresting prologue to Paradise Lost ( aka Turistas ), as a baleful figure is seen mirrored in her shocked eyes. Even before we are introduced to the film's principal characters - 6 young holiday makers back packing thru Brazil in pursuit of sun, sex and surf - we've got a very good concept that there's going to be difficulty in shangri la. After their bus crashes in the middle of the boonies, our hapless travelers - Yank Alex ( Duhamel ), his sister Bea ( Wilde ), her best pal Amy ( Garrett ), Australian Pru ( George ) and lecherous Brits Finn ( contorted ) and Liam ( Brown ) - decide to head for the closest beach, where they're initially seduced, and then drugged and stole, by the townsfolk. Rescue appears to come in the shape of Kiko ( Steib ), a local boy who offers to take them to his uncle's house deep in the jungle, but there unthinkable horrors await, as the group is taught a cutting lesson in exploitation.
Exploitation, in reality, is the key to Shangri la Lost, which lazily rehashes elements familiar from The Beach, Wolf Stream and above all Hotel even as it takes full virtue of the horror of foreigners so common in post-9 / eleven America. For a bit Shangri la Lost appears to be going somewhere fascinating, even confronting, with its opponent Zamora ( Lunardi ) embodying the righteous revenge of a country which has for many years been manipulated and exploited by the north and now wants "to even the scales".
But it isn't long before he's reduced to a cartoon villain, skewering the iris of a sidekick for kicks, and horrible not just of 'gringo' outsiders but of the 'worthless' Indians that he's all too pleased to exploit himself. Such simple caricaturing guarantees that it's impossible to take seriously Zamora's snarling critique of America's commercial rapacity, and the film's last message ( keep your distance from those crazy Brazilians ) appears simply to reinstate the sort of xenophobia that earlier scenes had tried to reverse.
It is pretty much as though first-time screenwriter Michael Arlen Ross lost his backbone even quicker than his characters lose their organs. What remains is a blood-spattered picture postcard of a flick. The cast is ordinary but simple enough on the eye, the view is beautiful, and director John Stockwell has even discovered a way to incorporate the kind of underwater sequences that he sharpened in his earlier films Blue Crush and Into The Blue.
Which is just too because once the 'turistas' have worked out the character of their horrible problem, there's not much left for them to do but cut and run, so that their breathless dive thru a wet cavern system can provide a pleasingly novel setting for what's otherwise completely by-numbers cat-and-mouse plotting. If the cave photographs strikes spectators as rather gratuitous, it is as nothing in relation to the peculiar 1980s-style ethics ( whereby the characters who have sex are also the ones who die ), not to mention the inexcusable line, "Would you guys mind if I went topless?" It is sufficient to leave any one crying for blood, but that's the film's other problem : just too damned lots of its main characters survive.
Decision Brazil's visitor industry gets a bad rap in this horror-lite shocker that might just leave you rooting for the bad guy.
By Imdb
