The wait is over, after a year of trailers for Eli Roth’s much delayed movie, could the Green Inferno live up to the anticipation. How many horror movies have come out this year that is not sequels or remakes? You might think in some sense Green Inferno is a re-make of “ Cannibal Holocaust,” aside from the fact they are both cannibal films to two do not have as much in common as you might be lead to believe. It does start off with the displaced Americans on a trip, this time it’s to chain themselves to trees and save the indigenous people of the Peruvian rain forests. Their plane goes down in flames and the very people they were trying to save are now trying to eat them.
Roth’s gore factor has a similar level of camp as hostel, but can rein it in and get deadly serious when it is time to disturb you. Much like his other films there is some humor interjected into this, ranging from literal potty humor to stoned cannibals laughing at their food. The violence is visceral sometimes even cartoonish in its extremes. All characters pretty much get what is coming to them, though some of the nice guys certainly get the worse end of it, giving credence to the saying that nice guys finish last.
Its message is some times heavy handed, but there are worse political leanings to soap box upon, the corruption is everywhere slant works for me. The irony of college kids being eaten by the very natives they were trying to save is not lost. The sub text is one of the elements that really separate it from just exploitive fare like Cannibal Holocaust. Like most horror movies you need not look to rotten tomatoes for validation, as serious film critics just don’t get it. They are better off left to watching boring Victorian dramas about depressed teen-agers in love, as they will never understand why we love the blood and guts. Roth knows when the threat of something is worse than it actually happening. Sometimes he even foreshadows the worst, but leaves you hanging as a plot point. The modus operandi, of the blow dart blowing savages is to dismember and devour. People are not the only thing the natives have cooking up when it is discovered one of the girls is a virgin they have special plans for her.
This really depends on how much you enjoy this sub-genre of exploitation, which leans on the torture side of torture porn rather than the more pornographic elements. It seemed to unsettle the audience I sat in opening night with, not pulling any screams, but the tended to cringe back in disgust for most of the movie, though texting is the next covering your eyes as two girls sitting at the end of our aisle paid 14 dollars to text through the entire movie. It was left open for a sequel, which I would go see, as any type of horror movie that deviates from the same old same old, found footage ghosts and zombies would be welcomed at this point.
