What you may need to know:
1. A group of idealistic student activists travel to the Amazon and are captured by a tribe of cannibalistic natives.
2. Director Eli Roth does for Peru’s tourism industry as Hostel (2005) did for the Czech Republic’s.
3. Roth is the very definition of a Marmite filmmaker. Some would consider him as a master of the genre, others as a dumbbell hack. I hate Marmite.
4. This has been doing the festival rounds since September 2013. There’s no sign of an official release date, but The Green Inferno will screen at the IFI’s Horrorthon in October.
5. FYI, “The Green Inferno” was the name of the film-within-a-film in Ruggero Deodato’s light hearted romp, Cannibal Holocaust (1980).
6. Broadsheet prognosis: Tastes like chicken.
Release Date: October (Limited release).
(Mark blogs about film, TV and other stuff at WhyBother.ie)
I have a sort of car crash, can’t look away relationship with movies like this (Hostel, any of the Saw movies after the first, that sort of thing). I understand that objectively they’re not good movies but there’s something I find very entertaining about them. I imagine a lot of people feel the same way about some reality TV or Jeremy Kyle type shows.
Eli Roth is an appalling filmmaker. His horror films helped start the tiresome trend of just showing buckets of blood and guts in horror films, and forgetting what makes horror so great- the scares. The Green Inferno continues that trend by just ripping off (and passing it off as homage) Cannibal Holocaust, a film that was pretty poor in the first place and more than likely notorious for the simple and fairly ugly reason that it features actual animal slaughter for no other reason but shock value. Roth’s success baffles me.
It is odd that Cannibal Holocaust received so much criticism for killing animals on film but Apocalypse Now didn’t… Only difference being quality of the film.
Usually hate this type of stuff and agree that ugly does not equal scary but I actually liked Hostel. I thought it was an interesting premise and it was well made.
Roth was also pretty good as “The Bear Jew” in Inglourious Basterds