A lot of people probably have high hopes for Turistas. It’s the first feature distributed by Fox Atomic, the new cult-film subsidiary of Twentieth Century Fox, and it was co-produced by Mark Cuban, the billionaire mogul and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, HDNet, 2929 Entertainment and probably your right arm.

Alas, this dull, nasty, formulaic horror picture will likely disappoint anyone who’s seen more than one film about reckless, hard-partying youths whose hedonistic vacation goes horribly awry.

In this case, it’s a handful of Twenty-something American and English tourists – none of them are worth mentioning, since few rise above the charm and personality of Paris Hilton and K-Fed — whose bus crashes in Brazil, leaving them stranded. An overly friendly local named Kiko, who speaks with a Borat-like mastery of the English language, introduces them to a beachside paradise, filled with exotic drinks, loose women and wild raves. Naturally, Kiko is the inside man, luring the dumb gringos into a trap orchestrated by a really, really evil greaseball who splices open tourists’ chests and sells their pricey organs on the black market.

This could have been a scathing indictment of proudly xenophobic Americans and the just desserts of their offensive ideas of third-world cultures. Instead, it’s a gruesome “shocker” filled with yucky close-ups that aren’t a bit scary. Sharp things poke into soft, squishy things, a bunch of muddled action scenes occur in darkened spaces (to mask the technical ineptitude), and – lest we forget Turistas is directed by the guy who gave us Blue Crush and Into the Blue – lots of tanned, half-naked bodies drift in pretty oceans for no purpose other than to get the 14-year-olds off.

Horror movies aren’t usually the cinematic beacons of nuance and character development, but when these Gen-Y flunkies are so anonymous and forgettable that we’d just as soon see their kidneys go to someone who might deserve them, this film’s in a lot of trouble.