The Green Inferno (2013)

Director: Eli Roth

Writers:Eli Roth, Guillermo Amoedo, Nicolas Lopez

Composer: Manuel Riveiro

Starring: Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Aaron Burns, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Magda Apanowicz, Ignacia Allamand, daryl Sabara, Nicolas Martinez, Sky Ferreira, Eusebio Arenas, Richard Burgi, Matias Lopez, Ramon Llao

More info: IMDb

Tagline: No good deed goes unpunished.

Plot: A group of student activists travels to the Amazon to save the rain forest and soon discover that they are not alone.

My rating: 5.5/10

Will I watch it again? No.

The end teases you with THE GREEN INFERNO PART II: HEADS ARE GONNA ROLL.  Just kidding.  It's been 8 years since Roth's last directed feature came out.  This one was made two years ago but there was some legal issue (so I heard) that kept this from being released.  Let's forget for a moment that I've been anxiously waiting that long to see it.  What a disappointment and big missed opportunity.  Wow.  I'm not going to spoil it.  There's not really much to spoil anyway.  It takes way too long for us to get to Chile which means there's too much time spent setting up plot in the big city with the college kids.  There's also some stuff mentioned about female genital mutilation that sounds like it's going to go somewhere later on but it fizzles out with a weak ass whisper.  It does get better for the last two thirds of the picture once we're in the jungle but there are things that aren't thought out well that bugged me.  I wasn't looking to pick this apart but there are so many plot holes that the picture starts to collapse on itself because of them.  Roth made this film because he's such a huge film fan of the cannibal genre that picked up steam in the late 70s and died in the early 80s.  I like those films, too.  Compared to those, GI is incredibly weak.  I thought I was watching a PG-13 film.  Just when you think there's not going to be a lick of nudity, we get just a scant amount and then she's promptly dressed with slender strands of rope fabric which barely covers her nipples and a rope fabric bikini bottom.  What kind of tribe does this?  Females of all ages (ALL, mind you) were covered this way.  Whatever.  I didn't come to see this for some bare chested women but it's a staple of the genre that's now over forty years old.

The gore is even kept to a minimum.  There's not much imagination in this picture and that's especially shocking considering it came from Roth.  I really dig this guy's pictures but he's taken a big misstep here and he's delivered an under-cooked story that lacks a lot of what made those early cannibal pictures so great or at least memorable.  And the ending? Are you kidding me?  It's just another one of those plot points that's flimsy and not as solid as it could be.  I actually liked the attempt at doing something different with the ending but it was the last straw on a camel's back that broke a half hour ago.  I didn't hate the movie although it sounds like I did.  It just saddens me that I waited two years to see it and spent $20 for a ticket and concessions to wash it down.  The best scene in the movie is when someone commits suicide.  It was fast, unexpected and fucking awesome as shit!  At least there's that.  His next one, KNOCK KNOCK comes out in a couple of weeks.  I'll be there.