gruesome

tasty

Two years after generating a bit of controversy on the festival circuit, writer and director Eli Roth's long-delayed cannibalism yarn The Green Inferno is only now receiving its belated theatrical release. It tells the story of wealthy left-wing student activists who travel to Peru to protest deforestation and the abuse of indigenous people. After a plane crash over the jungle, they are found by the isolated tribe they came to protect and rapidly realize they are on the menu. It is the type of fly-in-your-Chardonnay twist Roth has utilized before: in Hostel, for instance, egotistical and privileged Americans journeying to Eastern Europe in search of debauchery (get high! get laid!) become the prey of even more debauched, egotistical, and privileged men and women paying a small fortune to torture and murder.

In the new film, Roth obviously aims to satirize vacant social-media-era activism via his doomed, naive, profoundly outmatched characters ("activism is so...gay!" one minor character chirps), but the sermon becomes more and more confused as the film goes along. Are people who travel to the rain forest to chain their bodies to threatened trees still just self-righteous, bloviating Internet dolts with nothing on the line beyond 140 characters and a hashtag? Is the film, in fact, saying every act of activism, every social cause, is infused with and undermined by entitlement and guilt? Does the harshly cynical portrayal of the protagonists excuse the retrograde vision of tribal people as a bloodthirsty, grotesque, gyrating throng? Does Roth know?

Beyond such questions, The Green Inferno as a genre experience (as a film intended to frighten and nauseate) is nowhere near as consistent and potent as one might hope. A few scenes hit incredibly hard—a plane crash, an eye-gouging and limb-severing execution—but the cinematography is unfortunately flat and haphazard, often squandering the atmosphere and majesty of the lush location, and Roth self-sabotages the sense of anxiety and doom he conjures with juvenile humor ("oh, no, they have the munchies!" quips the designated pothead as a few natives begin to bite his fingers). The performances range from capable-if-unspectacular to awful and tone-deaf—I do not see an Academy Award in indie-pop starlet Sky Ferreira's near or distant future—and the entire enterprise builds to a strained, unruly epilogue including, one after another, an inexplicable decision by a key character, a dream sequence doubling as a low-brow jump scare, and a who-cares? coda nestled halfway through the end credits.

C

Why a plane crash? I'm scratching my head.
Why didn't they just volunteer to go there?

I guess I liked it, but David's review pretty much sums it up. I'm not the biggest Eli Roth fan eventhough I thoroughly enjoy Cabin Fever and Hostel, but I never understood why he got so much hype in the industry. He's a competent director and it shows here, however other than a few well done, incredibly effective scenes there's not much else going on. The performances are all over place and the ending was weird and rushed at the same time.

The Green Inferno

This is a strange film. I would have thought it was easy to make a film about South American cannibals scary, but this was surprisingly tedious. The gory stuff is shown only in split-second glimpses, and it all looks totally fake; Papier-mâché limbs, covered in paint and corn syrup. The make-up and props departments should be embarrassed with their work. Even on live humans, the make-up was fairly poor. Hours after capture, some of the girls still had bright, shiny red blood on their faces, as if just drawn. There are some cool deaths (the pilot, the man walking into the propeller) but one girl escapes and gets into a boat only to never be seen again (perhaps I missed something).

Comedy is thrown into this film in a strange way. A girl shits herself and makes funny faces as if copying Jeff Daniels from Dumb and Dumber. A very odd shift in tone. And a guy masturbates while captured, presumably fearing for his life, but he can whack one out just fine. That same guy is seen at the end of the film on a satellite image as a hunter. And there's a dream by the heroine where she turns into a vampire/cannibal thing. It's stupid things like this that make the film just so laughable. Not to mention the utterly worst acting from every single cast member that I can remember from a feature film ever (Daryl Sabara and Sky Ferreira are particularly atrocious). This group and their shit acting reminded me of a similar group of missionaries in Rambo. The dialogue is utterly laughable too. I just cannot believe just how much of a lack of intensity there was while watching this film.

Roth's films all seem to be like college projects. Such undeveloped B-level crap. And for that level of crud, he didn't even manage to get the fairly "tasty" Lorenza Izzo to show some tit. As a marketer, I dug how the credits were accompanied by a column featuring the cast's Twitter accounts. But unfortunately this is where the positives start and end.

D

Nice review. It is almost alarming how badly Roth fails to turn a tantalizing, instantly scary concept (lost in the jungle! a tribe of cannibals!) into an intense movie, and the comic relief is indeed dire.

Thanks.

I was just really disappointed. From when I first saw the trailer I expected really good things. I was thinking Apocalypto-level of intensity and, although I hate it, Texas Chainsaw Massacre-level of lost hope. But it was flat throughout, and all of the victims seemed to be quite cool with what was happening. The screams and cries for help didn't make me feel anything at all. The savages were quite shit, too. Maybe because it was headed by a woman, or maybe because they just looked ridiculous painted in red (and one guy in black and yellow), I don't know, but this film didn't conjure up any feeling of impending dread, which was so easily done with natives in other films such as Bone Tomahawk and Apocalypto.