Most college students wouldn’t mind catching a few extra hours of sleep on a Sunday morning/afternoon. If awoken by a protest out on the quad, some might take to hurling empty beer cans out of the window. Justine (Chilean actress/model Lorenza Izzo, who happens to be married to director Eli Roth), however, is inspired.
Justine decides to take action and get involved directly with activism. She seems at least partly misinformed and her ideas are challenged by her father, but Justine plans a trip to the Amazon rainforest to play a role in preserving the land. She takes the trip to Peru with a group with social activism extraordinaire Alejandro (Ariel Levy, 2012’s AFTERSHOCK), classmate Lars (Daryl Sabara, who might be better remembered as one of the SPY KIDS) and several more, because this is the sort of movie that needs a decent-sized population to slaughter.
The group is determined, but this stops once their plane crashes and they fall into the hands of a tribe whose priorities fall more along the lines of cannibalism and torture than shaming loggers. And from there, THE GREEN INFERNO is host to precisely what one would expect to happen with Eli Roth, a group of naive twentysomethings and a remote location.
THE GREEN INFERNO (named after the film-within-a-film in Ruggero Deodata’s CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST) is, expectedly, a movie brimming with brutalities that include—but are certainly not limited to—throat slashings, beheadings and female genital mutilation. (The lame-brained message about conserving rainforests gets buried under the snaky waters once all of this enters the frame.)
With all that is presented, it’s like Roth and co-writer Guillermo Amoedo were watching CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST four times a day for a month, chowing down on turtle soup for each viewing. THE GREEN INFERNO isn’t necessarily a knock-off, but the influence of works like Deodata’s 1981 shockfest and Umberto Lenzi’s THE MAN FROM DEEP RIVER (considered the first in the cannibal subgenre) is obvious.
THE GREEN INFERNO was made in 2013, but not released until 2015, the same year Roth’s KNOCK KNOCK hit theaters. In 2013, Roth had not directed a feature-length movie since 2007’s HOSTEL: PART II. In that time, Roth was helming shorts for and making cameos in other directors’ movies. It was time, it seemed, for him to attempt to shake the genre and remind fans that he’s still relevant and that he can still shell out gore with the same unsubtle manner that garnered him attention in the first place.
THE GREEN INFERNO doesn’t have the shock value of many of its predecessors, but viewers are still likely to lose track of how many heads-on-sticks there are. And that’s just the sort of thing that will amuse fanatics of this particular subgenre. What more could they need? (If the answer is “a diarrhea gag,” don’t worry, Roth has that covered.)
BLU-RAY REVIEW
Video: 2.40:1 in 1080p with MPEG-4 AVC codec. Details and colors are strong, but the overall video could have benefited from a more grainy quality (a misstep from Roth).
Audio: English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1; English Dolby Digital 2.0. Subtitles in English, Spanish and French. Dialogue is clear and the jungle sequences provide an appropriate atmosphere.
Feature commentary with co-writer/director/producer Eli Roth, producer Nicolas Lopez, and stars Lorenza Izzo, Aaron Burns, Kirby Bliss Blanton and Daryl Sabara: This is a cluttered track, but Roth serves as something of a host, guiding the conversation for the duration. Fans of Roth and THE GREEN INFERNO will enjoy.
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