Let’s do a role play activity: let’s say you are an indiginous South American cannibal. You are what you are. What does your average day look like? You probably have to hunt, forage, spend time with your family, prepare your home against monsoon-like weather. You’ve probably got some religious activities. Maybe some tribal meetings? Either way, I would assume that you, oh… I don’t know… OCCASIONALLY DO SOMETHING BEYOND ravenously consuming human flesh and genitally mutilating your women?
In Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno, however, this is not the case. Cannibals are apparently always ALWAYS hungry for man meat. All they really seem to ever do is cook and eat people. Oh, and genitally mutilate their women. Because, you know… savages. Am I right?
I hated The Green Inferno. And I don’t hate movies all that often. As a matter of fact, the last movie I hated as much as The Green Inferno was Aftershock, a Fantastic Fest 2012 film starring and produced by none other than Eli Roth! I’ve seen movies here at Fantastic Fest that just aren’t for me. I’ve seen films I’m indifferent towards. I’ve seen stuff I love. But it seems my heart has a special spot of hatred for Eli Roth’s recent output.
The Green Inferno is the first film directed by Roth in many years, and this one is his love letter to the cannibal exploitation sub-genre that was popular in the 1970s. Roth’s story takes us into the endangered-by-deforestation jungles of Chile with the most unlikeable group of college activists imaginable. When their plans go awry, and other twists and turns occur, the unlikeable activists fall prey to a tribe of cannibals, and the horror gets pretty visceral.
I want to make it clear that I don’t hate The Green Inferno because of the gore. Or the cannibalism. I consider myself a horror fan and love films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1 and 2, or The Hills Have Eyes. I even enjoyed another film dealing with cannibalism at this very festival! I can handle gross out movies. I also want to make it clear that no, I’m not familiar with the films Roth was paying homage to here. I’ve never seen Cannibal Holocaust or any of its ilk. Fixing that problem has become a higher priority for me now just to further convince myself that it isn’t the depiction of cannibalism that I found repulsive in Roth’s film. I’m confident that I can lay out the argument for my hatred of The Green Inferno in a logical fashion, however, without having seen the films that inspired it. If Cannibal Holocaust is great, that doesn’t mean Roth’s film isn’t awful.
I’ve already mentioned what I consider to be an offensive portrayal of an indiginous tribe. Roth told our Fantastic Fest audience that the actual villagers on film had a blast making the movie and I heard that the production put new roofs on all of their huts. To be fair: good on them. But I still feel that the portrayal of these cannibals was one-note and manipulative. I might have still been able to enjoy a film that portrayed a tribe in this fashion if other elements clicked into place. But I’m being honest when I say that I hated almost every single element of this movie.
The cast is led by Lorenza Izzo, who plays Justine. She is a tolerable screen presence who I managed to work up a modicum of empathy for. But for the most part, I found the acting to be flat and distracting. I found the characters as written in Guillermo Amoedo and Eli Roth’s script to be unbearably awful humans. I found every single attempt at humor to be patently unfunny. Even the developments in the plot and the way the story played out felt frustrating to me at times, although I’ll admit that the basic plot outline could have supported a decent film if all those previous sentences in this paragraph were not true.
But what about the gore? What about the horror? In a cannibal movie this is what it’s all about, right? Yeah, there’s some pretty crazy gore for you horror hounds out there. And this movie goes full-on with that stuff. Me? I can’t imagine a group of humans I’d rather see get eaten than some of the degenerate and petty and naive characters on display here. But I still got no pleasure out of seeing them go. Oh, on top of the gore, there’s also some other base “shocks” that Roth puts on display. There’s diarrhea, there’s the previous mentioned genital mutilation, there’s masturbation. Roth throws everything onto the screen that a thirteen year old could ever want, and he does it with the same level of maturity and tact that a thirteen year old filmmaker might. Mind you, once again, that the mere presence of depictions of diarrhea or masturbation or cannibalism isn’t in itself to be reviled. But Roth’s flippant inclusion of all these elements, with no purpose beyond base shock value, is not real horror filmmaking in my mind. The inclusion of all these elements doesn’t deepen Roth’s horror cred in any way since they’re all laughable and infantile rather than horrifying.
As if I haven’t expressed enough frustration with the movie already (and I’m not just heaping it on, these are all my honest reactions to the film), I also feel that the execution of the movie is astoundingly poor. The image quality felt cheap and digital; soap-opera-like. There are small diversions and deaths that feel out of place, superfluous, and poorly executed. There are two instances of such astoundingly awful computer imagery that I can’t believe they are in their final versions. And again, if these GC elements were absolutely crucial to the film, I could understand it. But I think removing these CG moments would’ve been the smarter decision when the final effects ended up looking like they did.
Some people loved The Green Inferno. Eli Roth clearly has a hardcore following and some have hailed him as a new leader in horror cinema. I think The Green Inferno had very little to say. And what it did have to say was fairly cynical and infantile, as well as poorly executed by flat actors who are portraying loathsome characters. I’m not one to deny an experience to someone else, so if you are an Eli Roth fan, by all means, check out The Green Inferno. You couldn’t pay me to sit through that film again and it might just be best for me to avoid Roth’s films in the future as well.
And I’m Out.