The Green Inferno
Student activist wannabes decide to chart a course for a Peruvian tribe to save from bulldozing gas militants, not expecting a plane crash to land them right in the middle of a fight for survival as the very indigenous people they wish to supposedly save will look upon them as the enemy...and lunch!
***/*****
“Don’t think. Act.”
“Because activism is so fucking gay.”
To say Eli Roth is a polarizing figure in horror would be an
understatement. I don’t necessarily dislike him personally…to me he is living
the dream many a horror fan growing up with the genre could only dream of. Those
who grew up with Cannibal Holocaust, thinking this savage but evocative film
was something quite explosive, abrasive, haunting, unsettling, yet
thought-provoking and purposely disturbing, wondering if this could be done in
the 2000s, Eli Roth is willing to try. Obviously, the Italian directors who
went for the jugular back in the 70s/80s had an advantage Roth wouldn’t be able
to succeed; particularly, in regards to mutilating animals and going for the
psycho-sexual in bluntly subversive and visceral ways that perhaps would earn
it picket signs and a battlecry of negative publicity.
It is addressed, mind you, but in a way that condemns the
sexual horrors used on females in “less than civilized” people whose jungle is
threatened by “civilized” government utilizing the value of the natural gas
which lives within the land they have inhabited for many lifetimes. A few
college kids (the dialogue has one student, a friend of the lead heroine
(played by Lorenza Izzo, who I liked a lot), considers them a group of trust
fund suburbanites finding causes to interrupt their affluent guilt) decide they
want to make a difference--worthy causes I’m not cynical against, and so the
fates of young adults who want to help not hurt Amazonian folk on the verge of
losing their jungle home to “encroaching civilization” could be worth
emotionally investing in--and take on a mission to stop bulldozers from running
over the jungle land of an Amazonian tribe, ancient and insulated in their own
culture and world, even perhaps killing them off instead of relocating them.
A passionate and influential student organizer named
Alejandro (Ariel Levy) is able to round up and inspire students at a New York
University to join him in a travel to the Amazon jungle I mentioned above. Izzo’s
Justine becomes involved with them, wanting to understand how to organize and
help African women being sexually savaged by males in their tribes after
learning about how these acts are commonplace across the globe. So this cause
with Alejandro could be like a learning experience. Good intentions are not met
in kind, however, because when they do go, the tribe welcomes them rather
horribly…and violently.
The idea to do something significant derails when the very people these activists want to help literally obliterate them. Saving an indigenous tribe seems like a cause to get behind when a Peruvian militia bulldozing their land for the gas underneath them undermines an ancient living structure that had existed way beyond petrol-fueled society. But this is a far cry from a college yard hunger strike in the name of health insurance for janitorial labor for the NYU.
“This whole thing was a mistake.” Justine couldn’t be more
right.
I have noticed that the film has more detractors than
supporters. While I enjoyed the film, I admit a few parts of it irked me. While
the *idea* is absolutely horrifying, a victim bound to a stake while large ants
crawl up his body, the execution of the CGI just left so much to be desired.
Even the trailer for the film exposed this scene as rather sadly laughable. The
actor (Nicolás Martínez) sells it for all its worth…his work at trying to make
the scene a gut-wrencher is commendable, even if he’s up against a seemingly
unwinnable horror situation. There’s a scene where Roth can’t help but intrude
upon the power of his film with potty humor. That is just his style, though. I
mean, one or two scenes almost take me right out of the movie, but Roth, to his
credit, could regain my interest in what he does right. One of the students has
a very queasy stomach that becomes increasingly worse until she takes a
splattery shit while stuck in a bamboo-stick cage with her fellow peers who
turn around in abject horror. The tribal kids outside giggle and sweep their
noses at the smell of the poo! There’s another scene where that very victim
slits her own throat when she realizes that “pig skin” she was given for food
from the tribe (like the others in her cage) was pieces of her girlfriend (she
had attempted an escape that doesn’t go as well as hoped for)…the unpleasantness
is further emphasized when the kids play with tattooed flesh of the victim!
After the girl succumbs to the slit throat, the others load her body with
marijuana as to get the tribe stoned while eating from her body after a “good
cook up in the oven” (there’s a hut that works as a type of heating oven that
cooks the meat they rip from the bones of victims!). These are moments where
you read from the Eli Roth haters and accept their validity. Some simply like a
little black-as-pitch humor to go with their flesh-eating and body carnage.
Roth shows his influences in this film. If you have watched
Cannibal Holocaust or Cannibal Ferox, The Green Inferno will have resonance.
There’s the bodies impaled on spears as a symbol of their “victory of the intruders”.
There’s the tribe descending upon the outsiders, bringing them to their digs,
and deciding what to do with them. Justine is a virgin and so her value to the
tribe is substantial. Alejandro emerges as a real nasty piece of work. More on
him in a moment. You see how the reactions of those not expecting such an ugly
twist of fate have a hard time dealing with this situation they were unprepared
for. There are multiple escape attempts. Only one of them is successful. I
think you might can guess who does succeed. That bit of predictability should
be expected, though.
The ending is rather fascinating. Justine has a decision to
make and doesn’t offer up the experience she went through to others who might
take it upon themselves to fucking torpedo the tribe. She’s asked about
possible rumors of cannibalism, if the tribe was ever hostile towards her, what
happened to the students, and how did the militia respond to the tribe. She
gives them quite a story, let me tell you.
The film can get just a bit contrived. But Roth follows
after the masters of this disreputable genre. The key character is Roth’s wife,
Izzo. Her Justine is our emotional
lynchpin. She seriously wanted to help people disadvantaged by the bulldozing
machine of progress…that her own comfortable lifestyle results from the wealth
accumulated by the country she lives which often benefits from that machine is
another topic altogether. I think Roth might combat the derision accusing him
of belittling the tribe by how Justine defends them at the end. She still
believed in their cause. Her whole experience was a cruel twist of fate (the
engine sabotage that caused their plane to go down in the Peruvian jungle), but
she felt that the tribe considered them a foreign enemy much in the vein of the
militants threatening their way of life. That very militia does help her in the
end creating this odd buzzsaw of irony. Depending upon the very people you are
dead set against while fleeing from the people who offer harm towards her but
she feels are victims themselves.
Alejandro appears to be this humanistic, vocally optimistic
leader of change, but the ulterior motives that surface really cast him as one
of the worst kind of human scumbags anyone would ever come across. Daryl
Sabara, of the Spy Kids movies and the prick bully who gets it good from a young
Michael Myers in Rob Zombie’s Halloween, plays a student named Lars. Lars was
to follow behind Justine and Martínez’s Daniel when Alejandro purposely drugged
him to stay behind so he wouldn’t be the necessary chosen human meal. Well,
Alejandro accomplishes just that and Sabara is pulled away by this mass of
dopehead Peruvians with the munchies! It is a gruesome bit of business. At
least his is over in about 45 seconds. Poor chunky Aaron Burns (as the timid
Jonah who carries a torch for Justine) is butchered in graphic detail and the
process of plucking away from his body to feed the tribe is displayed in a type
of workman-like reality. The women cut away from the body, use bone and meal
from their crops to prepare the meat for a grand feast, and settle in for a
divine feeding frenzy. Some chew the meat right from the bone. I was taken
right back to Night of the Living Dead (1968). Not a care in the world that the
cooked meat they devour is from an actual person.
Roth even closes the film with students wearing Alejandro shirts
as if he were the next Che, doing another protest for a cause. Alejandro is
such pure slime; Roth doesn’t even paint shades of grey. He acknowledges a
truth regarding the supposed “stopping the dozers” and exposing their dangers
they commit to early on before their plane crashes. How a gun is held to
Justine’s head and the reason the group wanted her along in the first place
(daddy is a UN lawyer!) was purposely devised as a tactic in their favor as a
publicity stunt. Alejandro commenting on Jonah while he’s being prepared,
cooked, and eaten as if he were nothing to the very cause he dedicated himself
and his masturbating (yes, masturbating!) during a moment of intense stress
further implant his douchebaggery into our psyche. His behavior is a designated
shock to the senses…he’s the fraud that talked a good game that manipulated
kids who had their heart in the right place. Now the place they find themselves
is some kind of horror show they couldn’t have possibly anticipated.
The film does plant this seed of dread when Justine chats
with her dorm buddy. The dorm buddy warns her and tries to urge her away from
the trip, but it is all for naught. The danger becomes oh so real. Justine’s
great hope lies in a tribal kid she befriends, even playing a little necklace
flute to him. This contrivance is just part of the genre’s MO. A plot device
that helps the heroine get a chance to escape. Roth even provides a busted
phone and a quiet passage past a tiger right into a battle between the militia
and tribal warriors trying to make a stand that is all in vain. Justine has a
few advantages the tribe just doesn’t have. In this odd development she becomes
their voice. She almost got sodomized with a sharpened bone after her naked
body was painted white…at least her heart was in the right place. Because
Alejandro’s wasn’t, he got left behind. Well, he was made a martyr and became a
cult hero…too bad his ego couldn’t bask in the moment!
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