Ok, yes! Excitement! The yearly era of heat and blockbusters that we call “Summer” is drawing to a close, and we approach that most joyous time when we get to wear sweaters, and drink pumpkin spiced coffee, and consume the darkest of beers! Huh. I just realized that I might be a basic, white, 17 year old girl. This is weird. Huh. Moving on, the most important thing though is that the unstoppable march of time moves ever closer to Halloween, and that means we’re getting some more horror movies!
None of this “sequels nobody asked for to movies that weren’t any good in the first place” bull shit (I’m looking at YOU, Sinister 2!). No more lackadaisical efforts from once promising directors that fill us with more second hand embarrassment than actual terror (Go fuck yourself, The Visit). Yes, now is the time for a movie about cannibals chowin’ down on some naïve college kids. Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno has come to save us all!
So that right there was basically the plot. Cannibals be doin’ cannibal stuff. You want me to expand? Ugh, fine. Justine (Lorenza Izzo*) is an idealistic freshman at a prestigious college who joins a group of student activists who travel to the Amazon in an attempt to stop a company from eradicating a native tribe and drilling for gas under their village. While flying back from the protest, their plane crashes, and the survivors are left stranded in the middle of the rain forest. They’re quickly found by the same natives they were attempting to save, but surprise surprise, these dudes and dudettes are headhunters and cannibals and they’ve got a hankering for some corn-fed, Grade A American meat.
&nsbp;
Will our intrepid heroes survive and escape? Well, I know the answer. I don’t want to spoil it here. That would be lame.
Its pretty obvious that I was excited for this movie going into it. I can’t help it. I’m a gore hound and I will stand firmly behind anything that promises me some good practical effects and people being torn limb from motherfucking limb. And while The Green Inferno does deliver the gore, the overall tone of the movie is closer to a comedy than a true horror film, similar to a late period Friday the 13th.
Just a friendly reminder that this is a thing that happened in an actual Friday the 13th movie.
There’s a ridiculous running gag where the kids keep getting shot with knock-out darts, and some of the kills are laugh out loud hilarious. But then there are the truly brutal and shocking moments that do an amazing job of causing some genuine shock and fear. There have been movies that balance these two extremes extremely well, stuff like You’re Next and Shaun of the Dead**. I’m just not sure the Roth juggles them quite as well as he could have.
And this is further complicated by the activist message that the movie might be trying to get across. In the beginning, the entire movie is about privileged white people talking about what they can do to help the poor unfortunate souls in the places that aren’t America. The script is so bad and the acting so wooden at this point that it’s clear that Roth hates these people and so should we all. It just makes a very painful viewing experience for the first twenty minutes or so.
Then, when we get to Peru, you get the sense that most of the kids have good intentions, but are just way out of their element. But then the natives come in and just start up with all of the murder. It just feels very weird to be on the side of the rich white people fighting against the tyranny of a tribe that uses wooden spears and lives in huts. The liberal douche bag in me was extremely conflicted.
And that seems to be what Roth was going for in The Green Inferno. The entire movie is designed to set you off kilter, whether it’s causing you to shift your alliance between two vastly different groups of people, or making you laugh at one death and gasp at another. There have been better movies that have done this, better horror movies this year, and better movies by Eli Roth, but The Green Inferno is still a movie that has a great deal of value and is worth seeing. If nothing else it blows The Visit out of the fucking water.
*Izzo is the wife of director Eli Roth. It is unclear if she is at all related to Michigan State basketball coach Tom Izzo.
**I firmly believe that Shaun of the Dead is one of the most effective zombie movies made in the last 20 years. Don’t agree? I will fight you.
