Rooms for Tourists
A handful of high-school girls take a deadly detour en route to a somber destination in this low-budget shocker from Argentina. Elena (Jimena Kroucco) and Theda (Elena Siritto) are a pair of teenage girls who meet while traveling from Buenos Aires to a small town in the country. Elena is a student trying to keep up with her studies, while Theda is a troubled young woman given to terrible nightmares. Elena and Theda are supposed to catch a connecting train in the village of San Ramon, a town seemingly overrun with fire-and-brimstone preachers and locals with a taste for blood and vengeance. The girls miss the next train out of San Ramon, and soon fall in with three other girls in the same situation -- film student Silvia (Mariela Mujica), punk rocker Lydia (Victoria Witemburg), and absent-minded Ruth (Brenda Vera). There isn't another train until morning, and the stationmaster directs the young women to a bed-and-breakfast run by Maxi (Jose Santiago) and Nestor (Rolf Garcia Puga), a pair of brothers who inherited the business from their late mother. The girls don't feel especially comfortable at the inn from the time they check in, and soon sinister noises and disturbing apparitions give way to an extremely bloody murder. The four remaining girls quickly realize they are trapped in the bed and breakfast with no way out -- and that they have something in common that has led this community of killers to take up arms against them. Habitaciones para Turistas (Rooms for Tourists) was the first feature film from writer and director Adrían García Bogliano. more..
Director: Adrián GarcÃa Bogliano
Starring: Jimena Kroucco, Elena Siritto, Mariela Mujica, Victoria Witemburg, Jose Santiago
Proceeds along familiar genre lines. But the denouement comes as a surprise, the five women are great screamers, and the cinematography and music add to the general feeling of menace.
Mr. Bogliano, just 19 at the start of production, has made a promising debut that consistently hits the right creepy points while exhibiting impressive gory effects created with extremely limited resources.
Far grislier than one ordinarily expects from black-and-white, Habitaciones Para Turistas is a real homemade fright.
Director/cowriter Adrian Garcia Bogliano's self-conscious throwback to the kind of gritty black-and-white gore films that used to play drive-in theaters and urban grind houses is a short, sharp shocker that gets surprising mileage out of the oldest formula in the book of the dead.
It'd be great if Rooms For Tourists had a clearer point, or something significant to say about the human condition, but even in spite of its low budget, cruddy look, and modest aspirations, the movie is art of a kind.
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