THE GREEN INFERNO
#31DaysOfHorror — October 3rd
This October, for the second year in a row, I’ll be reviewing one horror movie each day! Respected classics, trashy and forgotten B-movies, both new frights and old… I love ‘em all. Well, some of them I’ll probably hate. We’ll see.
‘The Green Inferno’ (2015)
Directed by: Eli Roth
Starring: Lorenza Izzo as “Justine”
Ariel Levy as “Alejandro”
Daryl Sabara as “Lars”
Magda Apanowicz as “Samantha”
An entire largely-uncontacted Peruvian tribe as “a bunch of savage cannibals”
The Plot
Justine is a college freshman who’s having trouble sleeping because there’s a protest going on outside her dorm room, led by a charismatic guy named Alejandro. At first, Justine and her roommate Kaycee think the activists are lame (or, “fricking gay” according to Kaycee), but Justine is soon drawn in by their passion. She convinces her father to let her join the group on a trip to Peru to save an indigenous tribe whose land is about to be torn down by an evil corporation.
At first, everything goes swimmingly; livestreaming their protest around the world, the activists chain themselves to trees and blow up a few bulldozers, and then Justine (whose father works at the UN) is captured and has a gun held to her head, which was apparently Alejandro’s plan all along! Not too shabby.
And then on the way back to safety their plane’s engine explodes and they crash in the jungle and a bunch of them die gruesomely in the wreckage and the survivors are captured by a tribe of red-painted natives who have an insatiable taste for human flesh. So, okay, maybe not the best “save the rainforests” school field trip ever.
My Review
The Green Inferno was filmed a number of years ago has struggled to find a distributor. Since the movie’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in early 2013, rumors about the film’s gruesome content have spread around the Internet, as rumors do, making the film out to be one of the most grotesque things ever put to film. Naturally, this excited a lot of horror buffs, eager to see what all the buzz was about. Could it really be that gory, enough that it received allegations that some of the cannibalism was real?
Well, no. That’s silly. The actors are recognizable people who have acted in other things before and since, including Magda Apanowicz (The 12 Disasters of Christmas), Daryl Sabara (Spy Kids), and the director’s own wife, Lorenza Izzo. Eli Roth did not really feed Juni Cortez to cannibals. (Although, was that really Juni Cortez’s penis having an unfortunate encounter with a tarantula? …maybe I’m gullible too.)
Even though the gore and such isn’t really that intense, to deserve such speculation, the movie is otherwise plenty of fun, delivering on just about everything you could want from a story like this — except thematic underpinnings that make sense, which I’ll get to in a minute. It’s a lovingly-made throwback to cannibal exploitation films of the 70s and 80s, updated for the modern age.
The jungle photography is absolutely gorgeous, full of luscious, verdant greens and deep, earthy browns. Roth has said he wanted to pay homage to Werner Herzog with the film, and several sequences do indeed call to mind Herzog’s masterpieces like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo; the on-location filming for The Green Inferno definitely delivered results that a soundstage or substitute location would not have.
Like some of Roth’s other films, the tone of The Green Inferno veers wildly between gross-out shock, genuine, dread-inducing horror, and weird, campy humor (think the “Pancaaaaaaaaaaakes!” scene in Cabin Fever). The horror elements are where The Green Inferno truly shines, and where it truly succeeds in paying homage to the schlocky B-movies it so clearly is trying to emulate. When the activists are first captured by the cannibals, they’re brought ashore in canoes and are almost immediately surrounded by groping, grasping, caressing hands, trying to touch every inch of them. It’s creepy and invasive, and Roth films it with a jittery, jumpy camera that keeps losing focus. And the sequence just goes on, and on, and on, until you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the sheer terror the characters are experiencing.
Similarly, the first cannibalizing scene is utterly shocking and sickening — to the point where several people got up and left the theater. I don’t know what they were expecting, to be honest. But, even more than the dismembering and disemboweling and eyeball-slurping, what’s truly disturbing about the sequence are the dying character’s screams.
The film also has a recurring plot element having to do with female genital mutilation, a heinous activity by pretty much any definition. There is a ton of foreshadowing, and when Justine and the others get to the natives’ village, you find yourself just waiting for it, wondering if and when and how the movie will go that far. I won’t say much about where this ends up, just that I was impressed by Roth’s restraint. Which isn’t something people say very often.
Now, for the not-so-great stuff. The movie is trying to be an indictment of keyboard slacktivism and “social justice warriors,” according to Roth himself, and I think in these sequences, the film falls flat on its face. Simply being excited that their live-streamed protest is the top trending topic on Twitter and has hit the front page of Reddit doesn’t mean these kids are slacktivists. On the contrary; they got up off the couch, left their safe spaces, and flew halfway around the world to actually do something for a cause they believe in. The film wants us to point at a character and say “Hah, he said Reddit, what a loser,” but is he really? He’s just successfully stopped a megacorporation from destroying the ancient, ancestral home of an untouched Peruvian tribe.
Check out this poster for the film — a dismembered hand sitting in the jungle clutches an iPhone with a list of hashtags, including “#JungleGate, #SocialJusticeForAll, and #NativeLivesMatter.”
What is the film really saying here? “Don’t bother caring about stuff because the people you’re trying to help will just wind up eating your esophagus and you’ll kinda deserve it?” Sure, activists who don’t actually look into all the nuances of what they’re protesting about can often do more harm than good. But — light spoilers — Alejandro is actively corrupt, and he doesn’t sufficiently represent the very concept of activism itself enough for this all to cohere into an actual argument. Ah, well. On the people-eating-people front, the movie delivers.
Spoilers below.
The movie really crashes and burns in the final few minutes. Personally, I try not to let a movie’s ending ruin the entire experience for me, so I’m going to try and forget that The Green Inferno ends the way it does. Justine escapes, leaving Alejandro behind, and when she gets back to America she tells her father and various other official-looking people that the tribe actually rescued and cared for her, and that everyone else died in the plane crash.
I get that by lying, she saved the tribe, which was more than her activist friends did. But this doesn’t hold up to even a second of scrutiny. Her story would unravel almost as quickly as she could tell it… Surely the authorities would try to retrieve the crashed plane? Where they would discover everyone’s bodies mounted on stakes? …no?
And then… and then! A few seconds into the credits, there’s a stinger. Justine receives a phone call from someone claiming to be Alejandro’s sister. She says she’s found a satellite photo of what looks like her brother, and she needs to talk. And then we see Alejandro, covered in black ink, apparently having taken over the cannibal tribe. Cut to credits (again).
…Boooooo. This was not a movie that needed a blatant sequel grab. This was not a movie that needed a Bourne-style spy photo proving that a character we thought was dead is actually still alive. I don’t let endings ruin my experience… I don’t let endings ruin my experience… I don’t let endings ruin my experience…
