THE GREEN INFERNO (2013)

Studio:       Universal Studios
Director:    Eli Roth
Writer:       Eli Roth, Guillermo Amoedo
Producer:  Christopher Woodrow, Molly Conners, Eli Roth, Miguel Asensio Llamas, Nicolas Lopez
Stars:     Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Daryl Sabara, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Sky Ferreira, Magda Apanowicz, Nicolas Martinez, Aaron Burns, Ignacia Allamand, Ramon Llao, Richard Burgi

Review Score:

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Summary:

A group of student activists is captured by a tribe of cannibals while protesting in a Peruvian jungle.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Alejandro organizes a student activist group determined to publicly shame a construction company by streaming video of their modernization development in the Peruvian rainforest. Driven by her attraction to Alejandro and the influence of her crushing classmate Jonah, Justine joins the group. Alejandro’s girlfriend Kara takes a disliking to Justine. Against the advice of her father Charles and her roommate Kaycee, Justine goes to Peru with the other activists, who include Lars, Amy, Samantha, and Daniel.

In Peru, Alejandro introduces everyone to Carlos, who is funding the protest. Carlos leads the group into the jungle. Wearing masks, the students infiltrate the construction crew and chain themselves to the trees and earth-moving equipment while streaming live video feeds with their phones. The armed militia guarding the site captures Justine at gunpoint when her padlock won’t catch, but a phone call stops the gunman from firing. Everyone is freed and escorted back to the plane.

Aboard the plane, the students celebrate their success at halting the construction operation. Justine expresses anger at Alejandro’s willingness to let her be shot for the cause.

An engine goes out. Carlos falls out of the damaged plane in midair and is impaled on the ground. The plane crashes.

A cannibal tribe surrounds the dazed and injured group. Kara is shot through the neck with an arrow. The others are shot with tranquilizer darts and captured.

The students are taken to the cannibals’ village. The Village Elder gouges out Jonah’s eyes and eats them as the tribe cheers and the students watch helplessly. The Bald Headhunter dismembers Jonah while he screams. Villagers prepare Jonah’s corpse as food and eat him.

Alejandro confesses to the others that he colluded with Carlos to stage the protest as a PR stunt and that development efforts will resume with Carlos’ company in control. Alejandro theorizes that the plane was sabotaged to kill Carlos. He also says that new bulldozers should arrive within three days and they can be rescued then.

The elder circumcises Justine in front of the tribe. Justine collapses and is escorted into a hut. With their guard distracted, Samantha climbs out of the prisoner cage and escapes to the canoe docked at the beach. Justine is returned to the others with markings painted on her body. Daniel realizes Justine is being prepared as a sacrifice.

The prisoners are given small food bowls to eat from. Amy realizes they are eating Samantha when she sees village children playing with flayed skin bearing Samantha’s tattoos. Amy smashes her bowl and slits her throat with a jagged shard.

Realizing that Amy’s body will be eaten when she is discovered, Daniel helps stuff Lars’ weed stash down her throat to drug the body. Daniel attacks Alejandro when he is seen masturbating as a means to relieve stress and supposedly think clearly.

The villagers eat Amy’s drugged body. Several of them collapse, including the headhunter and the guard. Justine and Daniel escape the cage, but Alejandro stabs Lars so that the villagers will eat him since Alejandro plans to stay behind. Justine and Daniel flee into the jungle. The villagers eat Lars alive.

After briefly falling into the river, Justine and Daniel make it back to the crash site and find all of the bodies impaled on posts around a fire. Daniel retrieves a phone, but he and Justine are recaptured.

Back in the village, Daniel is tied to a post and swarmed by flesh-eating ants. Justine’s body is repainted as the elder preps her for mutilation. The ritual is interrupted when a villager returns with the severed head of a construction crew worker and the male villagers take to the jungle with spears.

A Village Girl that Justine befriended frees her. Justine retrieves the phone from Daniel as he begs her to kill him. The Village Girl slits Daniel’s throat. Alejandro pleads for Justine to free him, but she refuses.

Justine crosses the river and escapes past a jaguar as she makes her way to the clearing where the militia is shooting attacking villagers. To threaten the militia into not shooting her, Justine pretends to upload live video with the defunct camera. Justine is escorted to a helicopter and leaves Alejandro behind.

Back home, Justine tells officials that everyone else was killed in the plane crash and the tribe cared for her. Justine denies claims of cannibalism and blames the bulldozers for destroying the tribe. After a dream in which she devours Alejandro, Justine receives a phone call from Alejandro’s sister Lucia. Having spotted her brother still alive in a satellite photo, Lucia tells Justine that they need to talk.

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Review:

When it comes to two-word terms able to put gasoline on the fire of certain horror-related debates, “Eli Roth” has polarizing power on par with “found footage.”  (“Rob Zombie” and “Platinum Dunes” rank high up there, too.)

Surprising no one then, is that Roth’s “The Green Inferno,” inherently engineered for optimal controversy given its cannibal content and unflattering depiction of an indigenous culture, swings a bold blade for sharply splitting opinions.  While Stephen King takes to Twitter to tout it as a “glorious throwback to the drive-in movies of my youth: bloody, gripping, hard to watch, but you can’t look away,” advocacy group Amazon Watch denounces the film as “patently racist” without having seen more than the trailer.

King realizes what Amazon Watch doesn’t, which is that “The Green Inferno” should be taken only as seriously as the midnight grindhouse flicks inspiring it.  The movie is neither campy nor outright comical, but it is wholeheartedly intended to be delightedly demented entertainment, not a documentary commentary on hot-button topics of female genital mutilation or rainforest preservation.  One can either be offended/repulsed by imagery of tribal villagers salting severed limbs and boiling a human head with an apple in its mouth or chuckle amusedly at the absurdity of it all.  Those falling in the former camp should know better than to watch an Eli Roth cannibal movie in the first place.

Justine is the girl-next-door coed everyone had/has living down the hall in his/her university dorm.  Wide-eyed and wide-smiling, Justine chases her crush on political activist Alejandro all the way to a protest in Peru with like-minded students.  Second thoughts are plentiful for everyone involved when best-laid plans go belly-up and a tribe of jungle cannibals captures the group, with Justine eyed as the main course in a mighty meal of college kid chowder.

Premise alone makes it abundantly clear that “The Green Inferno” is not to be poured into everyone’s teacup.  It’s violent and gruesome, although the most squirm-inducing bits are mercifully blurred with soft focus and edited with quick cuts.  Full-view gore is generally limited to body parts that are clearly KNB props and thus play as more typically palatable horror movie slaughter.

Scarring the mind’s eye with stomach-churning outrageousness is less of an agenda item than some might be led to believe.  Roth clarifies that intention with more than one insertion of juvenile levity.  A questionable masturbation moment isn’t necessary to make one character more of an a-hole than he already is and an extended diarrhea scene complete with fart noises probably doesn’t belong, either.  (Starting with a dream sequence and concluding with an improbable mid-credits epilogue, the second ending also should exist only in the Deleted Scenes section of DVD/Blu-ray extras.)  On the other hand, it’s hard to fault Roth for reminding his audience to process proceedings with good humor, even in bad taste, after the harrowing horrors of a live dismemberment and barbecue smoking of a corpse.

Beyond blood, guts, and take-it-or-leave-it gags of goofiness, “The Green Inferno” packs in plentiful tension with several tight “beat the clock” sequences.  Suspenseful chases and narrow escapes arrive via students fumbling with locks and chains as a gun-toting militia approaches or making a run for it while dart-blowing savages nip at their heels.  There’s much more meat to the movie’s action than flayed flesh and tribal torture.

Snickering cynics can also take sadistic pleasure in the film’s true message of activism gone awry.  Real-world news is occasionally peppered with stories of misguided youth taking up one-person battles in China or the Middle East only to end up imprisoned or dead without coming close to affecting anything resembling change.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be reminded what can happen when idealistic college kids thinking they know everything about how to save the world end up over their heads, no matter how good the initial intention.

Dismissing an Eli Roth movie is easy when predisposed to disliking an unfavorable perception of his personality or perceived exploitation of “delicate” subject matter.  Take such notions away however, and “The Green Inferno” deserves credit for charged currents of chaos in its carnage.

Roth has a tendency to hammer home the idea of “it’s only a movie” through overuse of his trademark themes and Chekhov’s Gun close-ups (a necklace, padlock, and passports are among a handful of in-your-face items Roth makes sure you notice from their first appearances).  Yet when that kind of noise is stripped away, what his story really taps into is the dreadful fear of being stranded in foreign territory without hope, identification, or means of outside communication, which is an absolutely terrifying notion.

NOTE: There is a mid-credits scene.

Review Score:  75

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