The Green Inferno (2014)
Directed by Eli Roth
A group of student activists travel from New York City to the Amazon to save the rainforest. However, once they arrive in this vast green landscape, they soon discover that they are not alone… and that no good deed goes unpunished.
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16 films that influenced The Green Inferno
What critics say influenced The Green Inferno
Still, with that in mind, it's interesting to see how Roth's fanboyish impulse to top "Cannibal Holocaust" director Ruggero Deodato and his Italian contemporaries winds up inadvertently revealing the relatively humanizing aspects of "The Green Inferno" as a cultural critique.
Between one of the captives experiencing a bout of explosive diarrhea and another formulating a plan to get their captors high by stuffing a corpse with a bag of weed, it seems as if Roth was as inspired by Cheech and Chong as he was by Ruggero Deodato (whose notorious “Cannibal Holocaust” provides “The Green Inferno” with its title — the exact same as found-footage forerunner “Cannibal’s” film-within-a-film).
While not as luridly violent or extreme as that notorious touchstone Cannibal Holocaust directed by Ruggero Deodato, it's still a full-on, nerve-rattling experience.
The story of Cannibal Holocaust and The Green Inferno is the tale of two different approaches to horror filmmaking.
I remember visiting the old Deuce — where I sat behind a guy who wasn’t just smoking pot, he was using a bong, great clouds rising to the peeling ceiling — to see Make Them Die Slowly, which I’d later learn was the American grindhouse title for Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox.
More than a decade later, this 2013 offering (which will crawl on to UK DVD this month after a fleeting theatrical platform) finds him regurgitating Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust and Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox, with added female genital mutilation.
He’s the brand of filmmaker who feels the need to combine the “parody” of something like a Date Movie film spoof with the likes of Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust or Umberto Lenzi’s 1981 Cannibal Ferox, crafting something that has neither the ostensible self-awareness nor the controversy of either.
Maybe it’s somewhere in the pages Justine’s copy of Moby Dick, where she keeps the flute necklace her mother gave her.
Like every one of the filmmaker’s prior features— Cabin Fever , his two Hostel movies, and Aftershock (which he co-wrote and starred in, but didn’t direct)—The Green Inferno sends a gaggle of boorish college kids out of their protective bubble of privilege, where certain doom awaits.
Controversial filmmaker Eli Roth ("Hostel," " Cabin Fever ") has finally made a film with squirm-inducing skills that match its provocative payload.
Eli Roth began his big-screen career recycling riffs from Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead in 2002’s Cabin Fever.
This overdue fourth feature from the writer-director of Cabin Fever and the first two Hostel movies takes its time getting to the grue, but when it does, you can see what Stephen King meant when he called it “bloody, gripping, hard to watch.”
Like Hostel and Cabin Fever before it, The Green Inferno offers up extreme gore, unlikable characters and seriously confused themes (is it a pro-environment film, an ode to imperialism, a satire of social-justice warriors or a poorly sketched combination of all three?).
But silly me, going off on a tangent after enduring a gruesome slice of exploitation such as this, the latest from director Eli Roth, the practitioner of provocation behind "Cabin Fever" and "Hostel."
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Like every one of the filmmaker’s prior features— Cabin Fever , his two Hostel movies, and Aftershock (which he co-wrote and starred in, but didn’t direct)—The Green Inferno sends a gaggle of boorish college kids out of their protective bubble of privilege, where certain doom awaits.
For anyone who thought the “Hostel” movies were a barrel of laughs but needed more cannibalism and less cultural sensitivity, helmer Eli Roth is finally back in theaters with “ The Green Inferno .”
In The Green Inferno, the man behind Hostel and Hostel 2 does jungle flesh-munching with so much bravura that I have to half-admire him.
The director of Hostel used to just want to gross audiences out.
This overdue fourth feature from the writer-director of Cabin Fever and the first two Hostel movies takes its time getting to the grue, but when it does, you can see what Stephen King meant when he called it “bloody, gripping, hard to watch.”
Toward the end of the film, she’s painted solid white in preparation for a dire cannibal ritual, which invariably leads to unwanted thoughts of Bo Derek’s mud treatment in 1981’s Tarzan, the Ape Man.
It was Roth’s 2005 Hostel that inspired critic David Edelstein to coin the term when writing about how the Americans-being-dismembered-abroad feature and contemporaries like Wolf Creek and The Devil’s Rejects upped their gore factor to unprecedented levels for multiplex movies.
It was Roth’s 2005 Hostel that inspired critic David Edelstein to coin the term when writing about how the Americans-being-dismembered-abroad feature and contemporaries like Wolf Creek and The Devil’s Rejects upped their gore factor to unprecedented levels for multiplex movies.
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The script by Roth and Guillermo Amoedo plants a lot of Chekhov’s guns early on, all surrounding the innocent-faced main character Justine (Lorenza Izzo): a flute necklace, a lecture on female genital mutilation, and, perhaps most obscurely, a poster for Jean-Jacques Beineix’s anguished epic Betty Blue tacked above her bed back home.
He shot on location deep in the Peruvian rainforest, and the film opens with a distinctive bird tweet I associate pleasantly with Werner Herzog's intense jungle epics "Fitzcarraldo" and "Aguirre, the Wrath of God." Roth is Herzogian in the way he photographs nature; it's intimidating, beautiful, wild, impenetrable and, in Herzog's words, a place of overwhelming and collective murder.