10 Rip-Off Movies (That Messed Up What They Copied)
8. Turistas Failed To Live Up To Hostel's Gore
In 2006 the PG-13 horror was well and truly dead (after a presumably bloodless, self-censored murder) and the much-maligned torture porn trend reigned supreme. Moral guardians (and The Guardian itself, for that matter) wrung their hands about the danger of depraved horrors coming from controversial auteurs like Neil Marshall, Dave Payne, and Eli Roth.
In this environment, as with any trend in genre filmmaking, countless knock offs and cash-ins were an inevitability. Torture porn proved particularly easy to ape, given the relatively realistic premises required no expensive CGI or complex monster animatronics conjured up with practical VFX.
In the year following Saw and Hostel’s massive successes, many movies modelled on their blueprint popped up, each of them careful to add an interesting twist - Vacancy turned Eastern European human hunters into middle American snuff filmmakers, Live Feed livestreamed the torture for a fear-the-net twist, even Captivity at least had The Mission helmer Roland Joffe on directorial duties.
Enter Turistas. Screened as the far more pretentious “Paradise Lost” in some regions, the horror sent a handful of obnoxious American tourists into the hands of Brazilian organ harvesters and… well, that’s it. No clever cat-and-mouse, no sly satire of exploitative holidaymakers or reality TV producers, not even any inventive gore or original kills.