The Green Inferno
Blumhouse Tilt/Universal Pictures
In theaters nationwide
Two Advocate staffers — horror movie buff Jen Levesque and total wimp Hunter Styles — saw the controversial horror flick The Green Inferno last weekend. The extremely gory film, directed by Eli Roth (Hostel, Cabin Fever), premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2013, then got stuck in legal limbo with no distributor. Finally, it is playing in theatres. Was it worth the wait?
Jen: No.
Hunter: But, this is your thing, right? Don’t you like really bloody horror movies?
Jen: I definitely saw my share of scary movies at a young age, and it became an obsession. Once you’ve seen something scary, they’ve got to take it to the next level in order to scare you again.
Hunter: I didn’t like The Green Inferno because I thought it was scary and gross. Sounds like you thought it was just boring.
Jen: Eh. It was decent. But I’ve basically seen it before.
Hunter: Let’s sum up the plot. A college social justice group flies to the Peruvian jungle to stop an evil corporation from decimating the home turf of an indigenous Amazon people, whom no outsiders have ever contacted before. By the middle of the movie, they get stuck in this tribal village, and it turns out the natives are cannibals. And everything goes horribly.
Jen: If you’ve seen the film Cannibal Holocaust, you can tell that it’s the biggest influence on Eli Roth here.
Hunter: That sounds insane. What is Cannibal Holocaust?
Jen: It’s an Italian movie, made in the late ’70s. Pretty much the same thing — explorers go into the jungle and get hunted and eaten. That movie is definitely more intense. Gory, but really low-budget. That’s what’s great about underground horror films — you can tell the filmmakers are mostly making it for themselves.
Hunter: As opposed to this one?
Jen: I don’t mean to sound like a horror snob, but Eli Roth is really mainstream, and this movie felt like a generic Hollywood version of Cannibal Holocaust, without the surprises. It’s like the Saw movies — they follow a formula. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.
Hunter: Wait. People were getting eaten alive. None of that surprised you?
Jen: The first guy that got eaten — that was definitely the most gruesome scene. Sawing him apart, eating his eyeballs — that had me cringing.
Hunter: I also thought that was the most effective scene. It establishes a style and level of violence for the rest of the movie, so you watch his death wondering how bad it’s going to get. But I don’t think it got any scarier after that.
Jen: There’s a throat-cutting scene that I thought had kind of a clever twist.
Hunter: Oh, yeah, that. I was hiding in my coat at that point. I saw some of it.
Jen: It takes forever to get going, though. The whole first half felt like an awful, cheesy teen movie.
Hunter: And the dialogue was bad enough to be laughable, except it was too awkward to be funny. I did like the line someone shouts in the middle of the movie: “I can smell my friend being cooked!” The actor was earnest, but it got some chuckles from the audience.
Jen: Well, there’s a whole cheesy factor with these movies, too. You go in for the laughs and the dark humor, not just for the spewing arteries and crazy blood.
Hunter: I read that Eli Roth cast actual members of Peru’s Callanayacu tribe to play the cannibals. That struck me as especially bizarre. Did he see this as a bid for some sort of authenticity? Because the jungle-savage trope is unconscionably racist and ahistorical. And yet here he is, using real people to make a movie that plays up harmful stereotypes against them.
Jen: It’s all a nod to the original movies. But yeah, it’s pretty racist.
Hunter: The happy ending features a helicopter escape over a field of dead native bodies. I mean, seriously?
Jen: I was just upset that there was a happy ending at all. This movie didn’t need one. If they had killed ALL the college students, that would have added a little more thrill. But again, happy endings are the Hollywood formula. As opposed to those low-budget cult classics that are hard to come by. Those can be super disturbing. They stick to you.
Hunter: So, this sounds weird, but maybe The Green Inferno doesn’t go far enough?
Jen: I mean, the gore looks real. It’s got a good creepy feel. But I’d recommend people just Redbox this one. Or watch Cannibal Holocaust instead. Or this movie called Antichrist, if you like the mutilation thing.
Hunter: Yeah … I don’t think I’d like “the mutilation thing.”
Jen: No, probably not.•
