Scary `Turistas' trap

"You're going to be staying in a tent; you'll have an air mattress. No director's chairs; you'll sit on a rock. You're going to be in that water filled with bat [droppings]," Stockwell warned potential cast members. "You're probably going to get scraped up and hurt, but I can give you 95% assurance you're not going to die."

Roughing it set the right tone for a film that depicts a tourist's worst nightmare: Its photogenic young protagonists get lost in the jungle, where they are drugged and robbed. And then things get bad. Stockwell, director of surf-and-sand movies "Blue Crush" and "Into the Blue," says a rattling experience on a Peruvian surfing trip motivated him to take on the project.

"I had been robbed by a group of 13-year-old, glue-sniffing kids and gotten shot at," he says in the safety of the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel. "I went to the cops, and they basically told us, 'If you give us $300, we'll let you kill these kids.' And I thought, if that kind of [stuff] is possible

Josh Duhamel of TV's "Las Vegas" plays reluctant tourist Alex. Despite less-than-cozy working conditions on a film that threatens to reveal whether one of People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People also has some of the 50 most beautiful internal organs, Duhamel (pronounced doo-MEL) says he loved working in Brazil. The camaraderie that developed on the set is evident as Stockwell barges into Duhamel's interview.

"I would say that the Brazilians are very good at mixing business and pleasure," the director says. "They work hard, they play hard. So did Josh."

"Yes, I did. So did John," the actor responds soberly.

"You partied harder than I did."

"Oh, please!"

However, the filmmakers' Brazilian journey didn't get off to such a delightful start. On Stockwell's first scouting trip, his and the producers' anxieties proved well founded.

"They've heard the stories, they've seen 'City of God,' they're like, 'Uh-oh, bad place, let's get out,' " says the director. "Three minutes outside of the airport, 9 in the morning, in the middle of the week, rush-hour traffic, we look over and there's, like, a 17-year-old kid with a 9-millimeter, robbing a woman in the car next to us."