The Green Inferno

Roth is a groundbreaking storyteller, the first in the field of cinema to show us that the victims trapped in cannibals’ cages must also poop from time to time. And that it might be a great source of amusement for little cannibal kids. But that’s not what makes Green Inferno such a dimwitted movie. That would be its screenplay – the lack of logical coherence, the bad handling of the characters, the forced “Wow!”-inducing ending, etc. (27.02.2018)

Eli Roth again. A Tarantino protégé who hasn't got a lick of filmmaking skill but thinks otherwise. And I felt terribly sorry for those Indians, those naturals, who on top of having been deprived of their natural habitat by the white men cutting and burning their land, now, as in this particular case, for a few coins and at least a piece of living space, they have to act like trained monkeys in front of the cameras of Hollywood white men, so that the cinema screen can be a nice entertainment and one egotist man can prove to himself again how great his talent as a filmmaker is, so that he can compete with Deodato and other Italian freaks from the 1970s. Eli, you’re not up to it, get lost! My only regret is that the filming didn't turn into actual gore, where the poor spectators would have actually feasted on Eli's liver, and he could have taken a fashionable selfie. (05.01.2016)

Stoned cannibals, that Eli Roth is an asshole… :-D There hasn’t been a proper jungle cannibal horror flick for about thirty years, so I was rooting for this project, but I’m not fully satisfied with the result. Here’s not about the story, only an idiot could expect that from the sub-genre, it’s about the gore and the intensity, and that’s where the problem is. Historically, cannibal horror is the most extreme sub-genre and as such it should push the boundaries of “good” taste and cause controversy. The Green Inferno, with all due respect to the few good gore scenes, does not get there. The first forty minutes are awfully boring; we have to put up with insufferable characters reciting incredibly hollow dialogues, and they are impossible to relate to. Then, when what was supposed to happen finally happens and the film starts being fun with all the blood, violence, chopping up and chaos, it all ends after a few minutes because the director starts taking the piss. In its own way, it’s a refreshing film, the beautiful locations in the Amazon make it a nice thing to look at, but I don’t think anyone will be very excited about it. (17.10.2015)

So we can finally see the kind of much loved and hated gore from the period of early defiance against harsh image censorship come to life again in its full glory. The question is whether we should be happy about it. Eli Roth is a poor storyteller, he can't build an atmosphere of dread and most of the characters under his hands are nothing but vague shadows in a trivial story without any emotional foundation. Green Inferno is merely a visually lush and unapologetically B-movie homage to its famous Italian predecessors, which has a huge and, given its creator's notoriously creepy disposition, incomprehensible problem: a desperate lack of perverse and physically violent scenes, barely masked by a very brutal black humour and crisp visuals, which for a change detract from the authenticity of the action and put the film, in terms of intensity of experience, in the shadow of the 35 years older Cannibal Holocaust. This was supposed to be a bloody, rhythmically edited genre ride, not a mindless social advocacy for oppressed indigenous tribes that has nothing to say and is boring to the point of being painful. (19.10.2015)