Rooms For Tourists

Sometimes we forget that there are other countries churning out movies too. Now, I'm not talking about the J-Horror craze, I mean low budget, independent movies that are just as good as what's coming from the U.S. I just watched an independent Argentinian movie called Rooms For Tourists.



The story here is pretty simple, five girls who are on their way to Trinidad are stopped halfway when they have to change from the bus to the train. When they find out they've missed the train, they have to spend the night in a small town. The trouble comes when the find themselves stalked by a strange man in a white mask who's killing them one at a time. As the story unfolds, we find out that this is a bit more than just another slasher movie, this is a slasher movie with a moral.

You see, all the girls have the same amount of money on them and they're all headed to the same place, it turns out that the same doctor has sent them all to the same place to have abortions, and the town they've become stuck in is very religious!

This may be the first morally bases slasher movie I've ever seen, and it's something that would NEVER be made here in the U.S. The simple fact that the killers are portrayed at the end, not as monsters, but as people with a moral conscience, is, in itself, very strange, but the fact that the line is blurred between who's really the killer is a very powerful anti-abortion statement, and one that the religious right in this country would never have the will to support.

I'm giving Rooms For Tourist four out of four cigars,

for it's courage to take an established genre and put a spin on it that I've never seen. It makes me glad that these kinds of indie movies from other countries are trickling into ours! So, until next time, when we'll explain that the character of Jason Voorhees is really a symbol of S.T.D.'s, remember that the best movies are bad movies!