*Sigh* Ho dear…..
Writer/director Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel) has gained popularity for gross-out horror movies that usually involve annoying people suffering from some type of body dismemberment. He’s rubbed elbows with the likes of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, with the three supposedly sharing a love for B-movie schlock. But what happens when the writer/director is left alone with nothing but his storytelling skills and definitions of entertainment to make a movie? A stupid, hilarious and rage-inducing crock of a final result.
The Green Inferno follows a group of awful college students…oh sorry, I meant “student activists,” as they travel to the Amazon jungle trying to prevent the rain forest from being torn down by a big-shot corporation. However their return flight crashes in the jungle and leaves them stranded. They soon realize they’re being watched by the indigenous population: a tribe of ritual cannibals excited for their newest feast.
As a writer, Roth (along with co-writer Guillermo Amoedo) paints the victims one of two ways: annoyingly stuck-up or amusingly stupid. Nobody in this movie, not even the girl the movie mostly focuses on, Lorenza Izzo, is enjoyable to follow. Horror movies have never been praised for containing thespian-levels of acting, but there’s no reason to care about any of these people from the first second they step into the movie. It’s only worth waiting to see how each person will get axed off by the cannibals. Speaking of which, the movie’s main selling point has been how grotesque and bloody it can get. Even if it earned its hard-R rating, the violence barely registers. After the first character gets axed off, the movie focuses more on the others going mad at the prospect of being eaten alive. It’s too silly to be taken seriously and shot without any flair to make it exciting. Granted, there are some disturbing moments involving female genital mutilation, but it’s sparse and loses the impact due to the hilarious acting from the characters once they’re captured.
The middle chunk of the movie is stupid enough to be classified as enjoyable…but then the film’s last 15 minutes happen and it TORPEDOES the whole thing. So to save you the trouble of wasting money on a AWFUL EXCUSE OF A FILM, I’m going to break one of the Critic Commandments (yes they’re real, shut up) and tell you how it ends. So, the final girl, Izzo, is about to be tied up and genitally mutilated, but a young child cuts her ropes and helps her escape. Why? Because they had two scenes where they stared at each other and final girl played a miniature flute on her necklace for the child because…reasons. So the final girl runs away and is rescued by a local militia (who she and the others were protesting at the beginning of the movie, by the way) after the militia was shooting at the cannibals to clear them out for more tearing down of the rain forest. So after being kidnapped, tortured, physically and emotionally scarred for God knows how long, what does final girl tell the authorities when she gets back to America? She tells them that the “natives” were nothing but kind to her, feeding her and offering her shelter while she was stranded after the plane crashed and killed everyone except her. She still puts all the blame on the militia and the company tearing down the rainforest for all of her trauma. Even when one of the authority members questions if the “natives” were cannibals as they’ve been rumored to be, she denies it.
*Ahem* WHAT?!?!?!? YOU AND A GROUP OF OTHERS (who you LIED about dying in a plane crash while they were being eaten alive) WERE ALMOST A DINNER COURSE FOR A ANIMALISTIC TRIBE. YOU MAY HAVE BEEN THE ONLY SURVIVOR OF A HELLISH NIGHTMARE….AND YOU STILL THINK THE CUTTING DOWN OF THE RAINFOREST IS THE WORST THING THAT YOU SAW THERE?!?!?!?
No. NO. NO! NOOOOO!!!!!! Even if this was just a dumb horror movie, in no universe with little to no form of intelligence would ANY MILDLY INTELLIGENT FORM OF LIFE think this is the way to tell the story. What would be so bad about telling them about the cannibals ate your friends and tried to slice up your nether regions?! Imagine another group of tourists get stranded and are captured by the cannibals and they all died? You could’ve been a voice to confirm the dangers of being out in the Amazon, but you chose not to because….WHY DID YOU CHOOSE NOT TO, AGAIN?!?!
Do not give The Green Inferno your money, do not give The Green Inferno your time of day. This is not a movie, this is a flaming middle finger from a guy who used a gimmick to make up for a ridiculously weak story. The film was supposed to come out last year but was pulled by the studio for financial problems. Hollywood should’ve let this thing rot in the jungle. Ugh.
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