The Green Inferno

The Green Inferno
Directed by Eli Roth
USA 2013

PLOT

After a horrific plane crash, a group of activist students are captured by an indigenous tribe in the Amazon. They soon discover, to their detriment, that the rituals and habits of this savage population are anything but cordial and friendly.

THOUGHTS

Eli Roth approaches this film with maturity and a clear understanding of his abilities. With his recognizable style and directorial touch, Roth writes and directs The Green Inferno as his personal homage to the Cannibal Movies of the ’70s and ’80s.
The group of shallow and insipid young protagonists, shown in the trailers, serves as an invitation for the audience eager to see how they will be killed and butchered.

After a verbose and monotonous 20-minute start, we reach the moment of the plane crash, where Roth demonstrates that he has perfectly absorbed the lesson taught by his friend Tarantino in Death Proof, particularly in the head-on collision scene. Roth reconstructs the crash with meticulous details, including slow-motion shots and close-ups. Once our characters are captured and arrive at the indigenous village, it’s clear that from this point on, the massacre for the protagonists will begin. Here, the film excels with its striking visual choices, marrying the bright green of the surrounding vegetation with the deep red of the indigenous people (and, of course, the blood).
The cinematography is impactful, with wide, open shots of the Amazon rainforest continuously reinforcing the overwhelming sense of helplessness the young activists find themselves in: there is no escape from the green inferno.

The rest of the film flows enjoyably between splatter moments, cannibalistic rituals, and numerous homages to past masters. The references to Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox, and D’Amato’s Anthropophagus are evident and, at times, clear. Additionally, the charges by the indigenous warriors and some of the attacks, including biting, are reminiscent of Romero’s zombies.

At the start of the article, we mentioned Roth’s “recognizable hand,” not only referring to the director’s love for extreme content but also to his tendency to dilute moments of gore and splatter with humorous and surreal interludes. These scenes manage to elicit a smile while also undermining the tension and fear. Examples include the intestinal attack of one of the captured girls, indigenous children running around the village with a severed leg in their arms, and the slow-motion vomiting during the plane crash.
This is a hallmark that Roth likely uses to tone down the visual excess and horror moments in his films.

The Green Inferno is ultimately a solid film, with its flaws, questionable stylistic choices, and some unbearably caricatured characters, but it offers high-quality splatter moments, stunning cinematography, and standout characters such as the protagonist, the warriors’ chief, and the village shaman.
The film is available on Sky on demand, Now TV, and Amazon Prime.

PANDEMONIUM MOMENT

The first ritual officiated by the shaman, where the first victim has their eyes gouged out, tongue cut off, all limbs amputated, and is finally decapitated… all captured in meticulous close-up.