If you harbor the guilty pleasure of gory cannibal movies where groups of jungle explorers get captured, stripped naked and subjected to all kinds of hideous mutilations and deaths by hordes of uncivilized, flesh-hungry savages, then I am sure you will enjoy Eli Roth's homage to the cannibal terror genre: The Green Inferno.
After a six-year absence from the director's chair, Roth has really delivered here with this jungle shocker. His love for this aspect of the horror genre is so evident in every scene of The Green Inferno, and it's really great to see a director of Roth's stature rekindling all those memories of the Italian cannibal shockers of the 70s and 80s which grew so notorious in regard to the censors' disapproval of these so-called "video nasties".
The basic plot of The Green Inferno centers on a band of student activists who journey to the darkest jungles of the Peruvian Amazon to expose the dodgy - and even murderous - dealings of certain industrial organizations and their mercenary armies. But disaster strikes when our heroes' plane crashes and leaves them stranded in the jungle, miles from any community... well, that is, miles from any CIVILISED community, for it's not too long before they run into an extremely hostile cannibal tribe who take them, prisoner. And their capture is a bitter irony too because it happens to be the same tribe that they originally set out to save! As expected - well, after all, it IS a merciless, gut-wrenching cannibal movie, isn't it? - the prisoners are soon put on the savages' dinner menu.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this modern take on cannibal horror is the fact that it's not really the tribe who are inherently the evil ones (although, admittedly, their aged female leader does give one the willies a bit, especially when she presides over a rather stomach-churning death scene), for they are feasting on human flesh just to survive in the hostile jungle. No, it's actually one of the activists, a ruthless sociopath, who really stirs up our contempt by virtue of his sheer nefarious actions. He is just a twister and a slimeball, a man for whom we constantly harbor the wish that he will eventually get his comeuppance, whether at the hands of the cannibals or otherwise. And does he? Well, I won't spoil the movie for you by giving too much of the plot away. You will have to see it for yourself to find out.
On the whole, I would give The Green Inferno a worthy 10 out of 10 for sheer entertainment value. Eli Roth has done a fantastic job here in his remarkable nod to all those cannibal holocaust movies horror fans used to love so much. With stunning scenery, vibrant color, interesting characters, a good and exciting plot, and enough blood and gore to satiate the appetite of any cannibal-horror freak, The Green Inferno is definitely one to add to your movie collection. The fact that the Amazon tribe are all played by real warriors certainly injects that extra sense of authenticity to the movie too.