Movie Info
Movie Name: The Green Inferno
Studio: Worldview Entertainment
Genre(s): Horror
Release Date(s): September 8, 2013 (Toronto International Film Festival)/Septemer 25, 2015 (US)
MPAA Rating: R
Bad time for a selfie, guy…
Justine (Lorenza Izzo) is a freshman at New York University and becoming politically active. When she meets an activist named Alejandro (Ariel Levy), she’s convinced to join Alejandro’s group in trying to stop the destruction of rainforests in Peru. With a successful blockage of the loggers, Justine and the plane crashes into the jungle. Unfortunately, the plane has been found by natives who believe that the students are part of the loggers group…and consuming them will give them their strength.
Directed by Eli Roth (who also worked on the screenplay with Guillermo Amoeda), The Green Inferno premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013 but didn’t get a release until 2015. The movie was met with largely negative reviews and a modest box office return. The film was met with complaints by people representing indigenous people who says the film played on stereotypes and fear.
When do we see Machu Picchu?!?!
The Green Inferno is named after the fake movie within the classic cult horror film Cannibal Holocaust. Roth meant the film to be a homage to the ’70s cannibal films and argued that The Green Inferno wasn’t xenophobic as a result. This all might be true…but it doesn’t make the movie good.
The plot for the movie is pretty flimsy despite a promising start. The movie sets up a lot of story with Alejandro and his motives, but it just doesn’t pay off by having the movie become a rather dull gore-fest. I was more interested in the plot of the activists than the natives who eat them…and kind of wanted them to eat them faster.
The cast is pretty poor. The main cast is basically made up of new actors or actors with little experience. The “cannibals” were allegedly made up of a native tribe to the area that Roth indoctrinated to film during the course of the production…and it makes you question if they understood what they were making since it does seem exploitive.
Dinner is served!
The movie mostly focuses on gore. The big plane wreck looks quite fake (even compared to the TV budget of something like Lost) and the dismemberments by the tribe are bad. Despite this, the fake ants killing a man look just as real as those ants from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull…
The Green Inferno is at least halfway original. In a world of remakes and found footage films, it is nice to have a “normal” linear film that just tells a new story. I just wish that The Green Inferno was better and scarier. The movie’s moderate success and a cliffhanger ending the movie has a sequel tentatively entitled Beyond the Green Inferno in production scheduled for a 2018 release.
