Paradise Lost

DVD review (region 2)
Directed by John Stockwell
Starring Josh Duhamel, Melissa George, Olivia Wilde
Released 8 October 2007

A group of tourists in Brazil are temporarily stranded after their bus crashes. Not wanting to wait for the next one, they instead take a trip to a beach bar located in the middle of nowhere and wake up, after a night of heavy partying, without any of their belongings…

Paradise Lost (released as Turistas in the United States) is pretty much a straight cash-in of Hostel only with Slovakia being replaced by the photogenic jungles and underwater caves of Brazil. Still, the story is basically the same – tourists from the Western world get more than they bargained for when they encounter unfamiliar terrain and a mad underground medical trade headed by a barmy doctor who collects organs to sell onto wealthy local hospitals. Even the movie’s ghoulish operating room is similar to Eli Roth’s Eastern European torture palace.

The movie’s biggest failing, however, is that the characters all appear to have skipped basic Horror 101 classes. Trekking through the jungle for 10 hours to an old dark house in the company of a mysterious local should have anyone’s defence mechanisms on overdrive – but this lot might be the stupidest mob to have graced the screen in some time. Moreover, it makes no sense whatsoever that the seasoned slaughterers of the movie left a group of healthy young tourists to recover, get dressed and escape when they could easily have had them after drugging their drinks the night before…

Paradise Lost hits DVD in a bloodier director’s cut, whilst the extras include a documentary on the special effects, some deleted scenes and a smattering of trailers. Calum Waddell

VERDICT: 6/10
Paradise Lost won’t do anything for the Brazilian tourist trade but any movie that has a few well timed jolts and Melissa George in a bikini is far from a dead loss…